Installing Linux on a Surface RT
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ค. 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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#MichaelMJD #MicrosoftSurface #Linux - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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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
I still use my old Surface Go for a single purpose - to run the Behringer X-Air software on my own personal live monitor mix. If the Linux build for that would work on the RT then I would also have a use for one!
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
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 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.
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.
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!
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?"
Oh yeah! A new MJD video
The tegra jailbreak reminds me of the tegra x1 jailbreak on the nvidia shield and Nintendo switch.
Yea, it runs on the same principles...
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.
Oh, yes, I've been waiting for this one.
I was not disappointed.
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
Always my go-to for geeking needs. Cheers Michael!
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
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
I love your weird OS shenanigans. I'm watching it on my Windows Vista Extended Kernel Laptop.
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?
mjd never fails to post a lot of "but everything goes wrong" videos
another great video
I LOVE ALL YOUR VIDEOS
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.
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
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.
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
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 TH-cam on the sofa, thanks for showing this thing still has some life left in it
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
“Permission Denied, Okay”. Idk why that made me crack up. 😂
3:03 A lot of Linux distros support this out of the box now.
A video for installation of PostmarketOs would be great
Archlinux and postmarket os has hardware acceleration for the surface rt
I'm very confused because one TH-cam 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.
Waking up on a weekend for a entering video
so cool i would recommend
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?
Ayy yoo, MJD, awake! Watch!
Yess
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.
These Linux folks sure are skilled
Cool! Do you can install hand gesture and optimize this tablet? You can change the GUI with openbox and add polybar.
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?
wow it was so easy thank you
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.
Made obsolete Microsoft hardware more usable, cool! Thanks for sharing the process
you can overlock cpu on preferences and improve experience, it ended up been a nice looking home assistant wallpanel
Superb !
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.
Your alive🎉
Thanks MJD
Thanks MJD
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'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.
That's awesome!
I was hoping to get my RT running to the point that I could Google & also watch my cooking videos from TH-cam, 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?
very good video
13:22 how do you get root access? I can't copy the files, it keeps saying permission denied.
Thanks for not helping. I'll just not have any wifi, I guess.
can you switch to mobile version of youtube in firefox and maybe have a easier time with that?
That’s cool!
Just so you know, Raspberry Pi OS is the new name for Raspbian, meaning that it was based off Debian and has the Xfce desktop.
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.
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.
Mine doesn't boot into RPiOS. It asks me to push ESC within 5 seconds to skip startup.nsh file. Any help is appreciated.
Great choice
Super cool! Shame about the lack of hardware acceleration.
Good call with RaspberryPi OS!
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
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.
Mine doesn't work. When I try to boot from USB, it gets to the "welcome to raspbian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)" screen, but then I just get a loop of apparent read errors:
EXT4-fs error (device sda2): __ext4_find_entry:1612: inode #[21 comm systemd-udevd]: reading directory lblock 0
The location in brackets changes, but it's just an endless bootloop of this same error.
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.
15:04 the first Tablet my family had was an acer with the same cpu as the rt. it ran android just fine, but eventually the demand of apps got to a level where this was no longer viable.
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.
Is there any reason that the nVidia tegra drivers for Linux don't work on this system?
Well watching this I was doing a side project and I have a raspberry pi running the imager right now
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?
i came back from death for mjd
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)
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.
Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox?
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)
golden keys not working on bios v3.30.500 16/08/2013 :( any way to update the bios to v3.31.500 like yours? Tried both rt builds 9200 and 9600 from clean emmc.
i got issue while restoring windows 8.1 on surface rt which is secure boot isn't configured correctly, how can I do this?
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?
How do you get root access to move the firmware and modules files to the firmware folder.
I keep getting permissions denied and I don't know how to get root access.
If someone can explain or help me that would be awesome!
Thank you
why didn't you use postmarketOS? it also supports the surface rt
Would this be bookable from Micro SD? So then booting into RT or Linux is just a matter of inserting/removing the SD card?
What about Android
Stock debian performs way better including youtube and vlc video playback
How did u fix the internet problem ?? I dont understand.
I did not understand root access. Can you explain that? Thank you
Thanks for the superb video. Just one comment: TH-cam works (slowly but acceptable) in chromium (not Firefox as you have found out)
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 do you boot jailbreak files into a pen drive?
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...
Cool Stuff
If this is a tegra device would it be possible to install the nvidia shield os?
What a nice video.
What about the other way to load Linux (tethered boot) that supposedly allows you to use display acceleration, has anyone tried?.