Surface Go Pen & Camera

Hardware Support
1

I recently installed Zorin OS on my Surface Go (1st generation) and everything is working kind of OK except for two:

  1. Camera doesn't work. I've already read the documentations, installed the surface kernel and libcamera, nope, it doesn't work. Camera apps detect no cameras and cam --list doesn't show anything as well.
  2. The pen works, but only to some extent. On desktops and windowed apps it works just fine but on maximized or fullscreen apps, once I took the pen away it stops working, bringing back the pen doesn't do anything until I make the app windowed again or reach from the taskbar area.

I tried searching the web but to no avail, and I hope that someone can help me on this.

2

You can take a look here if the camera is supported on your surface:

I haven't found solutions until now for the problem with the pen.

Are you on Zorin 17 or 18? You need a kernel >= 14 (Zorin 18 has this kernel, on Zorin 17 you can install it), the surface kernel and libcamera. On Zorin 17 you have to build libcamera, on Zorin 18 you can install it with

sudo apt install libcamera0.2 gstreamer1.0-libcamera libcamera-ipa pipewire-libcamera libcamera-tools

You wrote that you already had installed the surface kernel and libcamera, so I'm also at a loss.

Have you added your user to video group (replace $USER with your username)

sudo usermod -aG video $USER

newgrp video
3

I'm on Zorin OS 18.

Yes, I have the surface kernel (version 6.17 so it should work) and both the front and back camera are marked as supported (Surface Go 1st gen).

I did also add the user to the video group, so I don't know exactly which part had gone wrong.

4

Are you on Wayland or XOrg? You could try to switch to Xorg. Logout and at login click on your username then a cog wheal appears at the bottom right corner. There select "Zorin Desktop on Xorg" and then test your pen.

5

Thanks for the response.

Switching to Xorg solved the pen problem. However, camera are still not working.
Besides, switching to Xorg introduced more issues like some touchscreen gestures broke (like on firefox) where scribbling get interpreted as mere mouse hold-and-move instead of scrolling. It also crashed just as I was typing this message.

I think I'll just stay with wayland as of now, and wait for (if even exists) a better solution.

6

The issue with the pen seems to be related to Mutter in Gnome and be solved with version 46.5 (from ubuntu 24.10 on). But this Gnome version is not used in Zorin 18 which is based on ubuntu 24.04.

1 Like
7

Thanks for confirming the issue with pen.

I managed to make touchscreen work with firefox under Xorg with MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 so I think I'm good for now.

1 Like
8

You could try to disable other cameras (I'm not sure which ones you have: rear, infrared) for testing in your BIOS and only keep the front camera enabled.

9

Unfortunately that doesn't help.

I tried Fedora 43 (Which has newer software) and it worked, so maybe it's just the Ubuntu 24.04 that Zorin OS 18 is based on is a bit old. As you said the pen issue is also due to older GNOME version.

This is pretty unfortunate. Guess I'll just wait for Zorin OS to update their software :person_shrugging:

1 Like
10

I'm glad you found a solution that works. Does the camera work now on fedora?
Zorin 18 will probably not receive any other gnome versions.

1 Like
11

Yes, everything works normally on fedora, including the cameras.

It's a bit sad that Zorin OS 18 might just never work for me :confused:
Maybe 19? But that'll be a long wait...