Installing Linux on a Surface RT
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- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2024
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Not too long ago, I acquired an original Surface RT from a yard sale for $10. And with Windows 8.1 being utterly useless on this thing, I figured I'd try to put Linux on it!
Jailbreak Guide: windows-rt-devices.gitbook.io...
Install Guide: openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfac...
Restore Guide: windows-rt-devices.gitbook.io...
Post-Install Upgrades: firesphere.dev/articles/on-th...
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:28 - Pre-Install Prep
04:04 - Setting up Linux
07:02 - First Boot (from USB)
08:24 - Writing to the internal drive
10:20 - First Boot ( from HDD)
12:28 - Modules
13:28 - Browsing the Web
16:24 - Some post install stuff
20:02 - Installing apps
22:38 - Outro
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Background Music:
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#MichaelMJD #MicrosoftSurface #Linux 
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You literally can't make that thing any worse. I was a surface support agent for a few years. EVERYONE hated getting calls about the RT, you couldn't remote in to help the customer because there was no software to do it.
It's on Microsoft for releasing an ARM version of windows without a translation layer.
@@aprofondirthat was not really the issue. The issue was that it was locked to the windows store. You couldn't just install random binaries from the internet. That's why there is, to this day, no third party browser for WinRT.
It would only run Windows 8 Apps (Metro Apps), not classic Win32 Apps. If they allowed Win32 Apps (which would have been possible, the Surface does offer the Win32 API - just not for Third party apps) it wouldnt have been the Desaster it was.
They learned as with Windows10S you could upgrade for free to enable non-Windows Store Apps (and AFAIK the Win10 App store does allow classic Win32 Apps)
@@TheRailroad99 Actually it's because you can't run exe files on arm
@@miregoji2959 you can run exes compiled for ARM, but not exes compiled for x86 or amd64
I totally agree with you! The fact it can't get worse is almost inspiring me to dig mine because I won't care if it is ruined from it...
mjd never fails to mess up anything he touches then somehow fix it again
Ye
FURRY UwU Protogen~ RAAAAAAAAM
that's just the learning curve he has (me too i guess)
@@IBims1Markwhat
yes he never fails
Love how you grumbled about the troubles with it being a 10 year old device, whilst I'm watching this on a 12 year old Dell laptop running Linux.
I installed W10 on an old AMD E1 laptop yesterday (not for me, for another person), oh boy was it a mistake.
@@luisgpr1 Tell us more.
@@Espadasilenciosa It was just unbearably slow and unresponsive. Even with an SSD drive. Couldn't play youtube videos either, as even with the drivers from AMD it appears it was not being accelerated.
@@luisgpr1what de were u using?
It's worth mentioning that the Surface RT is a 32-bit ARM device, ARM in general is an architecture that has not had much success on the desktop before Apple switched from Intel to their Apple Silicon, so modern Firefox in particular may have very little testing on this architecture, and/or the codecs may not be properly supported.
If the Surface RT's RAM could be expanded, Android might have been an option at some point.
Edit: I have seen that the Surface RT uses an NVIDIA GPU and specifically an NVIDIA Tegra, I'm not surprised that it has issues, NVIDIA has always been terrible on GNU/Linux.
Babe wake up, MJD posted
Minors Spelling Mistake
@@png_saltwhooooaaahhhhhhh buddy
brooooo i actually thought this
@@png_salthmmm....
I woke up
For those who might think this is pointless, I actually have a great use for something like this. I have a very old windows tablet that I installed the raspiOS on. I plug it into my 3D printer running Klipper firmware. I'm able to run kiauh to install fludd on the tablet and with the tablet, I have a great touch screen interface for my 3D printer.
Surface Pad
The timing for tis video is scarily on point. I got stuck installing raspberry pi on a surface rt and gave up 5 days ago, and let it sit until now. I google a minute and here you are helping me do the final steps! Thanks a bunch!!
I had a Surface 2 RT like 10 years ago and honestly, didn't hate it. The whole "Edge" mode and "Desktop" mode thing was annoying af, but if you went in knowing that you weren't going to get "full Windows," then it was more than usable.
Edge mode🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤
@@Villager_U Yeah it came with some Kevlar gloves for when you used it because it was SHARP!
Not really, that part was pretty damn awful if you ask me.
you did not get da joke.. @@spazzypengin
I had one too, bought it right after it was released, and I really liked it. From there I moved up to a Surface Tablet.
@bryans8656 If it simply had a modern browser it would be actually useful with office 2013 installed
I literally just looked this up this week and now I get this video recommended. Nice
I actually did this some time ago after your first video on the surface RT!
I got one for 15€ and installed Raspbian to use it as a small media player and for some simples NES emulation. It works really well!
What emulator did you use? I tried retropi and it didn’t work very well. I installed it via terminal.
@@ATAKER66try just using raw retroarch
Can you upload anything related to this? I'd love to see videos of this running. I'm about to dig into installing raspbian once the darned recovery image downloads. 'tis a big boi.
Oh yeah! A new MJD video
That's absolutely fantastic. Having a modern browser as well as a modern Unix subsystem (including GCC )
on this device makes it MUCH more useful.
I was always thinking of making mine some type of Kiosk mode display / smart panel. The IE11 was too old for that. A modern FF / chrome should be easily enough for any simple dashboard website. Also, there are a lot of tools for the Raspberry Pi as its very popular, I would HIGHLY suggest anyone usijng the Surface to give this a try!
Maybe postmarketOS would be a good fit for this device? It has ARMv7 builds, some easy to install touch friendly DEs, and with that keyboard cover you could just use sxmo or even pure sway with some custom config. Also in my experience qutebrowser gives much better performance on these old ARM chuggers
Just to save me searching online for hours and seeing nothing but junk posts/vids, do you have a link to a walkthrough that actually works as of March 2024, to install postmarketOS?
@@tracylf5409 install gentoo on it please. there are lots of dirt cheap surface rts in my town and I'm thinking about buying one
Also interested in a walkthrough! Been looking for a way to use postmarketOS
Oh, yes, I've been waiting for this one.
I was not disappointed.
I like the part in the video where Micheal said, "Are you jailbreaking because you're wanting Linux? Or does wanting Linux cause you to jailbreak?"
Been a while since I watched MJD, and I'm so glad I found him again.
You know you can subscribe to him to see his video when they come out
@@Wii505 I know, I just forgot to subscribe since I was busy
Brings back memories... I did use desktop Linux natively on Tegra 3 powered device back in the day (Asus TF300T). It was my first ever experience with desktop Linux on ARM. Tegras were pretty much the only ARM chips which had proper vendor-supplied Xorg graphics drivers with 3D accelleration support. Though not fast by any means, TF300T ran Ubuntu quite well. I even managed to get some 3D games working at playable framerates (though it took some doing due to lack of desktop OpenGL). And even... some Windows RT programs via Wine.
Still have a full backup of my last installation somewhere (IIRC, it was Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04 with Xorg libs pinned to older version to play well with Nvidia drivers).
Sadly, it seems modern versions of Linux run poorly on the old Tegra 3. Your experience in this video is much, much worse than mine was back in the day. Your major issue is lack of working Xorg drivers, which, unfortunately, only exist for really old Linux versions and are likely darn near impossible to get working on anything modern.
EeePad TF101 user here, it was also my first mobile desktop Linux experience... in 2021.
Hey, it had no audio, but Discord in Chromium (Firefox segfaulted) ran... okay... ish.
Always my go-to for geeking needs. Cheers Michael!
I've literally spent a few days over Christmas doing the same thing, however with PostmarketOS instead of RaspberryPi OS. Still usable, unless you open a modern website. I think the Surface is going to end up in the trash if even Linux with XFCE won't even perform...
Edit: Doing all those hacks to get the wifi and battery meter working is not needed with PostmarketOS, it all just works out of the box.
I found an old Atom Netbook, kinda similar in specs to this thing. It would end up in the trash, but I decided to make it a retro Windows XP machine for older software and edutainment titles.
I love your weird OS shenanigans. I'm watching it on my Windows Vista Extended Kernel Laptop.
The long awaited video.
You should verify the hardware acceleration settings on Firefox and VLC and disable them in case the applications are attempting to use it which causes the crash.
I did that, it didn’t make a difference
@@MichaelMJD Ohh. Okk. Unfortunately
hardware on mainline kernel isn't possible because nvidia
@@CrackTheSurfaceLinus Torvalds was right,
"Nvidia, fuck you."
I don't know what Nvidia has to do with anything but I also have no idea what hard work acceleration is I've just heard that term a lot. @@CrackTheSurface
mjd never fails to post a lot of "but everything goes wrong" videos
Great video. Can't wait to try thin the RT that's been sitting in my cupboard for years. Now, where did I put that charger?
The tegra jailbreak reminds me of the tegra x1 jailbreak on the nvidia shield and Nintendo switch.
Yea, it runs on the same principles...
let's go new mjd post I know alot more abt surfaces now that I work in IT we stock those old crappy things for staff and students and I have to prepare them for checkout
glad to see linux once again give some life to otherwise very much obsolete hardware
It's like living with a bad heart and broken leg but I get it.
Without hardware accelerations and sluggish performance, it did not give any „life“ to it, „Windows RT“ is still more usable ironically.
@@dziugas1959 No one has made a graphics driver for that ARM SoC since it's very old. Even if the community actually made one it's less than worth it since the 32-bit architecture itself is already too old and obsolete. Not mentioning that every 32-bit system will eventually bricked itself in 2038 because of integer limit
@@sihamhamda47Not necessarily, you can represent 64-bit numbers on 32-bit platforms. It's just a little slower as you have to fetch more data. Thus, you can have a 64-bit time_t on a 32-bit platform (and even platforms which have a smaller data width).
Dude, raspberrypieOS on surface is way worse than even windows 8 rt in terms of usability😅 Linux didn’t give it some life at all.
another great video
I LOVE ALL YOUR VIDEOS
3:03 A lot of Linux distros support this out of the box now.
At least been Linux bet somewhere there is graphics drivers that will enable hardware acceleration if not with pi os another distro after all an RTs job is to watch RUclips on the sofa, thanks for showing this thing still has some life left in it
These Linux folks sure are skilled
Waking up on a weekend for a entering video
Have you tried installing Linux on an old iPad? Project Sandcastle seems to list it as an option, but I'd love to see if it's actually possible to get a modern distro running
Despite UNIX being a Pre-Linux, I always see these OpenSource UI unique
Your alive🎉
Made obsolete Microsoft hardware more usable, cool! Thanks for sharing the process
Hi, great video and in easy to follow guide. I am stuck at the boot from HDD section as you skipped the video. to the screen. did you d anything else in that time as mine wont boot from HDD.
Cool! Do you can install hand gesture and optimize this tablet? You can change the GUI with openbox and add polybar.
I've been thinking about getting one of these to use as a proper Linux tablet, so this is just in time. As for the boot image, I find it's better to symlink to the correct one with a simplified name so you retain the information at a glance for what version and build number it comes from, as well as enabling you to have multiple versions at the same time that you can select between.
Symlinks don't work on FAT32 afaik
@@resneptacle Why would you use FAT32 anyway, just format it as ext4.
@@anon_y_mousse The /boot partition, on both ARM and desktop, is usually always vfat (FAT32) due to the bootloader. You can probably use other file systems for it, but have fun with the issues. Besides, your choice to symlink your boot image makes no sense when you can just rename it?
@@bigredlizerd The EFI partition has to be VFAT, but not your /boot partition. Mine is ext4 and boots perfectly fine and fully supports symlinks. Renaming means you have to retain the information somewhere other than the file itself. Maybe you don't care and would just wipe it and install whatever, even if you run into problems and it would be a good idea to diagnose them which is easier with the information at hand, but you can very easily use a symlink to retain the information and allow for easier swapping between different kernel versions.
get a nexus 7 or 9/10 trust me you dont want a rt
Ayy yoo, MJD, awake! Watch!
Yess
“Permission Denied, Okay”. Idk why that made me crack up. 😂
next video:
going to the moon but everything goes wrong
Nah ,knowing this guy,nothng go wrong and he land on the moon,taking selfies with the flag and Apollo landing sites
Good call with RaspberryPi OS!
This is awesome, I think this would be a prime candidate for GNOME but since there's no 3d acceleration I don't know how well it would run.
A video for installation of PostmarketOs would be great
yo MJD, does this work on anything other than raspberry pi os? im trying to install a distro called zorin os. (on the rog ally)
you can overlock cpu on preferences and improve experience, it ended up been a nice looking home assistant wallpanel
Archlinux and postmarket os has hardware acceleration for the surface rt
13:47 in my experience, I think by default raspi os uses Firefox ESR, which is extended support. It's usually an older version that's built more around stability.
I did do some research and it looks like version 120 is newer than current ESR. Maybe raspi os maintainers changed this?
I thought RPiOs came with Chromium
@@kami-kun_va It came with FF ESR for me, maybe they changed the default?
I still use my surface rt pretty regularly but basically ONLY via Remote Desktop to my actual PC. As long as i have a good connection, it's almost like I'm carrying around my big computer in a tiny little frame.
That’s my Request! I did really like to run Linux on many Systems, Even on Low-End to High-End as a Daily Driver.
Pls recommend a distro with seamless gpu switching for optimus notebook
Oh man, using Linux on laptops and tuning performance to be perfect was my bread and butter for a while. Kinda sucks that I can't get proper clock speed control on either of my Zen 2 systems...
Superb !
so cool i would recommend
Super cool! Shame about the lack of hardware acceleration.
If this is a tegra device would it be possible to install the nvidia shield os?
This is super cool as a fun project, but the lack of hardware acceleration is a complete deal breaker for actual use. Is there any Linux distro that supports it?
I worked at Best Buy when the Surface RT came out and I thought it was a pretty pointless device back then. Too bad hw accel doesn't work in raspios, that would probably make it actually usable.
Thanks MJD
Thanks MJD
very good video
That's awesome!
i bought a dell venue 7130 MS. it has an SD card reader, sim reader + card, upgradable wifi and m.2, and some models may have upgradable ram(?) it came out around the time of this, and some models were the same price for stronger hardware. Nowadays you can get the top of the line ones for $60 when they costed $1k at the highest.
It even has a keyboard with a second battery to boost the batterylife. it runs nicely on ubuntu, but i'm, an arch guy baha.
Can't help but wonder if there's a distro with hardware acceleration for this thing. I mean, this is still an improvement over the mess that was Windows RT, but running with no acceleration is really less than ideal.
That’s cool!
I was hoping to get my RT running to the point that I could Google & also watch my cooking videos from RUclips, but I guess not. I'm wondering if you could use yt-dlp to get the video (store on the added mSD card) & then playback with VLC?
What about Android
Surface RT is a Tegra device? Sounds pretty good ngl!
Also, postmarketOS is _the OS_ you want for repurposed ARM devices
14:56 Indeed Michael, the boot sequence snitches the amount of cores, you got four penguins, that's the way to indicate how many cores the computer does have.
I'm very confused because one RUclips put the red underline meaning I've already seen this on this video that ive definitely not seen two it said this video was uploaded 12 hours ago and three when I clicked on it it now says uploaded 8 hours ago.
Tried to install retropi on top of raspberry pi os on the original surface rt a couple months ago. Took overnight to install via terminal just to not work and would just crash when launching a game. It’s best to use it as a fancy picture frame because of how slow it is.
dam
Hmm, even browsing the web seems to be a pain using this device. Maybe it could be used, for example, as the frontend for some home automation? So installing Linux, installing some home automation tools and use this as graphical frontend, physically connected using USB hub or something like that if it's cheap enough... smart enough to power a whole Linux system and having a working touch screen so you won't necessarily need a keyboard for it to work.
i came back from death for mjd
Hi, great video! I followed your tutorial to successfully install a version of Win 10. I wonder if you had a solution to transform the RT surface into a second screen, I couldn't do it with Win 10, maybe Linux has any ideas?
Probably the only way to make the thing useful. Not too surprised that it's using Raspbian. Kinda neat seeing it on a Surface RT lol.
I have one of those. I wonder what would be better that bootleg is for windows 10 with no support and no software, or raspberry pi os?
Thanks for the superb video. Just one comment: RUclips works (slowly but acceptable) in chromium (not Firefox as you have found out)
MJD! another great video! first windows, now linux. you just must.
he's done Mac related content as well
@@markusTegelane he installed windows 10 on a surface rt
Wait does this thing have full Mesa 3D acceleration for the Tegra? Installing Phosh would be kinda nice on this as the UI NGL. Or KDE Mobile.
Bonus points for doing those along with it being a BSD.
Final question - if the device is updated beyond October 2016, any chance of being able to downgrade it to stock firmware? (I feel like there has to be but idk)
Is there any reason that the nVidia tegra drivers for Linux don't work on this system?
I'm having the same error at 13:17 and i don't know what I can do about it, you just simply said "one root access later" ... what is that? what can I do?
Cool Stuff
can you switch to mobile version of youtube in firefox and maybe have a easier time with that?
wow it was so easy thank you
Yay raspberry OS
I'm a huge fan of that. It's beena good starting point for many non linux people. For most probably still go with Mint. But. Raspberry OS is simple. It's got a few basic things already installed, but not too much. And web browsing works just as well as in anything. So. I'm a huge fan of the operating system.
I believe you should config Firefox for such setup. Decrease amount of content processes for example.
@MichaelMJD i jsut today installed this and im wondering how you did the root access because wifi is also my issue
Got EXACTLY the same issue here - the root access bit 'flashed past' too quickly and I'm sure I missed something important (that may have been assumed knowledge) - Every other aspect of the install on my old Surface RT has been excellent so far - Michael's guide is brilliant - just needed more explicit instruction at the wi fi glitch and how solved it.
I've also got one and installed Raspberry Pi OS on it: it's unusable due to the lack of hardware acceleration. Can't even browse the web without the thing crashing. A bit sad.
I love tech, and this is really great for a noob, but can you do lubuntu in a wii?
Maybe I can turn it into a nice touch controller for intelligent home or at least a nice photo frame. The screen quality is actually pretty nice.
Great choice
You could've tried to to run Minecraft Raspberry Pi Edition on it… (apparently it isn't included by default in Raspberry Pi OS anymore but the download is still available on the Minecraft website)
Is that tablet the Gill Bates 4000 model, or is it the 6000? Oh, that thing is ancient! You need the Gill Bates 10000 which is over 9000.
Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox?
Well watching this I was doing a side project and I have a raspberry pi running the imager right now
why didn't you use postmarketOS? it also supports the surface rt
Usually 2 finger tap right clocks, so might have been the same here. This was before the hold to right click was a "standard" I think
Hold to right click has been standard on Wacom-based tablet PCs since before multi-touch devices were around.
PostmarketOS works as well
Hi MJD!
I only want to run youtube, e-mail and SOMEKIND of word/excel on this thing 😩😫
PLEASE tell me, is there anything I can do to accomplish that task???
Thanks in advance!
How did you solve the issue of copying modules and firmware to the lib folder? I am unable to do that and put the wifi running ( mainly because of lack of knowledge), can yooou/anyone help me?
Stock debian performs way better including youtube and vlc video playback
The fact you got Linux running on it is insane, imagine running android on that thing.
I always wanted to run Android on once
Someone already has did that
I had an optimus 4X HD which used that Tegra 3 Chipset....
Believe me you do NOT want that.
Anything newer than Android 4.4 is unbearably slow. I was always surprised how incredibly smooth Windows RT ran on these devices knowing what android feels like on a Tegra 3 device.
I have done it before however it is very buggy and unstable
I have done it before however it is very buggy and unstable