Getting the SP4 running with Ubuntu 16.04

Just got a SP4 today and unless I'm missing it there doesn't seem to be an up to date account of how to set things up and what works so I thought I would write one. Any help with the remaining issues would also be appreciated.

I have the 256gb hdd, 8gb ram i5 version.

So straight off what works:

• Screen (but not touchscreen)
• Physical buttons
• Keyboard and touch pad (including multitouch for the touch pad)
• Wifi
• Bluetooth (tested on a pair of headphones, pen is visible but won't connect)

Things I still have not got working:

• Pen
• Touchscreen (Ubuntu doesn't even seem to know it exists)

I am currently not sure if it is software rendering or not, either way I haven't had any issues with the screen, but I also have not done anything graphics intensive.

Now before I get into how I installed things a quick disclaimer. There are no guarantees this will work for others or is even a good way of going about things. Also I have only had it running for a few hours so there may be issues I have not run into yet.

What I did:

1. Shrink the windows partition. Go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. Then right click on the windows partition and go shrink volume and reduce it as much as it will let you (Mine let me shrink to 120 gb).

2. Make a bootable Ubuntu usb drive. See http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

3. Plug in a usb hub. The keyboard and touch pad won't work for the next few steps so I needed a usb hub to plug in a usb keyboard, mouse as well as the bootable usb drive.

4. Boot from usb. Turn the surface off and then hold the volume down button while powering on to boot to bios. There change the boot order so that usb drives boot before the internal drive.

5. Install Ubuntu. You should be able to boot off the Ubuntu usb stick now. I choose all the default options and installed alongside windows.

6. Install patch. You should hopefully now be able to boot to a working Ubuntu albeit with a tonne of issues (no keyboard / touch pad among other things). You now need to install this amazing patch https://launchpad.net/~tigerite/+archive/ubuntu/kernel. I did this by opening a terminal and going

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tigerite/kernel

• sudo apt-get update

• sudo apt-get install linux-surface

Now reboot and most things should hopefully be working. That is as far as I have gotten and I am pretty happy with it. However, if anyone has a working touchscreen / pen I would love to hear how.

Edit:

Some more issues

• Some screen flickering in chromium
• Sleep is hard to wake from and I seem to lose all touch pad and keyboard inputs

Also I should probably say that I wouldn't recommend a SP4 / Ubuntu combo to anyone new to linux or not accepting of encountering glitches and hardware issues. Though compared to my last laptop and its GPU related nightmares this thing has been pretty easy going to setup.