I have been putting a load of my time into polishing the Fyne based desktop – and it is becoming a very productive system that I use day to day. I have presented the topic at a few events recently (including GopherCon and GopherCon UK) and it’s getting a very good reception!

In my latest project you can see the lovely branded USB stick being booted on Microsoft’s Surface Pro (7+) in all its glory. The Fyne Terminal, Fyles app and Surfy web browser can all be seen here. Best of all it booted on the stock kernel as well!

I will most more info soon, but for now check out the project and possibly you can see what we are doing with embedded AI as well – controlling the desktop from a chat user interface!

Steps to follow

If you are interested in trying this for yourself you can follow these steps.

Preparation:

• Download Ferry or compile it from source, this will handle the USB stick (other ISO writers are available)
• Open Ferry and choose “64bit (amd64)” and then choose to download the latest FyshOS image.
• Once downloaded insert a USB stick of at least 2GB and complete the process
• To dual boot make sure you shrink the Windows partition by at least 25GB and create a new blank partition (no formatting required) – note it’s number and size for later

Installation:

• Insert the USB stick and start the Surface Pro by pressing Power and holding the Volume Down button
• Follow instructions to boot the live system
• On the setup screen connect to WiFi and exit
• Open a terminal and type “ip addr” and note the address that was configured
• Launch the install icon
• Follow the steps inserting the network information from before
• Configure your disks – **choose manual configuration**
  • Using the free space create an ext4 partition for root
  • Optionally create a swap partition as well
  • Make sure you use partition 1 as ESP (it won’t have a mount point)
• Complete the installation steps from here and reboot (removing the USB stick)

Configuration:

• If you get Windows up again after installation then go to the boot configuration (reboot holding Volume Up) and change the boot order to have FyshOS at the top
• To get touch screen working (not currently functional on FyshOS kernel):
  • We will use linux-surface, instructions at their GitHub page
  • sudo apt-get install wget gpg
  • wget -qO – https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/master/pkg/keys/surface.asc | gpg –dearmor | sudo dd of=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/linux-surface.gpg
  • echo “deb [arch=amd64] https://pkg.surfacelinux.com/debian release main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linux-surface.list
  • sudo apt update
  • sudo apt install linux-image-surface linux-headers-surface libwacom-surface iptsd
  • sudo update-grub
  • Reboot