Surface Pro 7 installation

Hardware Support
1

I got myself a refurbished Surface Pro 7 and successfully installed 18.1 on it. Actually the install went a lot more smoothly than when I set up my HP desktop a year ago. No big issues, other than having to steal the keyboard and hardwired mouse from my desktop macine dto do the installation because, of course, the keyboard with the surface is bluetooth and that doesn't work until the installation is complete.

Here is my current problem. I tried to install the linux surface module using the directions from the Zorin website and everything went well until the last but one terminal command which is sudo systemctl enable iptsd. It came back with iptsd.service does not exist

So I went back to the previous command sudo apt install linux-image-surface linux-headers-surface iptsd libwacom-surface which i assumed was creating iptsd and had not generated any errors then epeated the enable command with the same result

everything appears to be working except touch screen (and camera which I knew ahead of time was not supported).

Has anyone had this same issue or something similar enough to suggest a solution or work around?

2

The instructions on the linux-surface project don't include sudo systemctl enable iptsd so I guess it's not needed? It just says that if the command to install iptsd shows an error then it will fallback to in-kernel single touch drivers.

Their wiki page for the SP7 also doesn't mention iptsd at all:

3

I guess the insructions I had were old.

Anyway I solved it. Had to get grub to show and go into advanced options then choose 6.19-surface instead of 7.0 that it was taking me to without telling me.

4

I have seen a few reports of users here in Zorin forum where the same command has failed.
I'm glad to hear that the Zorin installation this time worked so well.