Chrome OS on Surface Pro 7

20210113

Working

except # Not Working

Not Working

  • Multi-touch Finger Input (Single-touch works)
  • Stylus Input
  • Camera
  • Surprise, dark mode hasn't been implemented in Chrome OS 87!

Have Problem Working

Speaker will make hissing noises with headphone injected

Mechanism

Chrome OS cannot be installed directly to PC due to hardware compatibility. Some hardware, e.g. the Intel Precise Touch Screen of Surface Pro, even requires special driver. Moreover, Chrome OS, or Android, are built to install on the entire disk (not a partition).

'brunch' is a framework project featuring these problems by including support for PC hardwares and installing Chrome OS on a .img disk mirror file.

Repo

sebanc/brunch: Boot ChromeOS on x86_64 PC (supports most Intel CPU/GPU or AMD Stoney Ridge)

Rammus recovery bin from CrOS Updates Serving

Bottle neck upstream repo

linux-surface/iptsd: Userspace daemon for Intel Precise Touch & Stylus

Install script

I use WSL to pack up the '.img' file. Due to the warning given by brunch readme, I made a special partition, a 32 GB NTFS 'G:', i.e. '/mnt/g/' in wsl for safety concern. The img size is thus set at 31 (GB).

The reason to use NTFS is to facilitate disk operation in Windows. An EXT4 file system will work too, but not FAT32 due to lack of support of large file.

sudo apt-get install pv
sudo apt-get install cgpt
sudo bash chromeos-install.sh -src chromeos_13505.73.0_rammus_recovery_stable-channel_mp-v2.bin -dst /mnt/g/chromeos.img -s 31;

GRUB2

Need to disable Secure Boot and Bitlocker first.

Turning Secure Boot back on is an easy method to disable GRUB - thus booting directly into Windows.

I use grub2win for multi-boot. Add the boot code generated by brunch (next to the generated '.img' file) to grub.cfg to add the Chrome OS boot entry, and specify options=ipts in kernel parameters to enable touchscreen input.

Update

Follow instructions of BiteDasher/brcr-update: Script to update Chrome OS installed using the brunch framework

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