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Installing Linux on Surface Pro 1g

Windows 10 will soon reach its end of life, and my 1-gen Surface Pro is not supported by Windows 11. I (finally) decided to install Linux to it. Fortunately, it's a not-so-easy nice adventure:

  • The device has only one USB port, so I have to bring back my 10+-year old USB hub.
  • My live USB drive cannot boot directly, I have to disable Secure Boot first, by holding Volume Up during boot.
  • I think years ago I learned that booting on USB might not work through a USB hub, but fortunatelly it worked well with my setup. This is done by holding Volume Down during boot.
  • Wifi adapter was detected in the live Linux environment, but not functional. And I don't have a USB-Ethernet adapter. Luckily, nowadays we have USB-tethering from Android phones, which works out-of-the-box.
  • Originally I planned to following this guide to set up root on ZFS, however, the system froze when building the ZFS kernel module. Then I decided to just use EXT4, yet I still learned a lot from the guide about disk paritioning, debootstrap and GRUB. I basically just followed the guide, except that I have to manually modify /etc/fstab for the root mount. On the other hand, this guide was also helpful.
  • Wifi adapter still didn't work after the installation, and USB tethering requires a simple change for DHCP (because I didn't install a desktop environment). Maybe I will fix it later.
I have not decided what to do with the device though, but the process was really fun!

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