I installed GhostBSD on my Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Tablet. It works as a laptop with a mouse. The keyboard backlights and the sound works. I don't have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cameras, or touchscreen. I can connect to the internet with an ethernet USB adapter just fine. The screen had tiny icons, but I selected "auto detect" in display settings and it looked normal after that. I uploaded the "HW Probe" information:
https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=929869ed2c
I know that is an anonymous site, but I thought the information might help.
This Surface Pro 6 does not have a cell modem. I bought it with Windows 10 and converted it to Pop!_OS (Ubuntu) with:
linux-surface/linux-surface
With Pop!_OS, everything worked including touchscreen and Wi-Fi except for the normal everyday camera apps. I used the directions on the linux-surface site above to get the cameras to work and they did - both front and back. I used a very simple camera app described on the site to get simple image captures.
I'm just beginning and don't have the knowledge to port any of this over to GhostBSD. I still have GhostBSD on the Surface Pro and it is going to stay there!
This Surface Pro 6 has two 500GB SSD built in drives. Microsoft used software to make this a single 1TB drive. Under Linux or GhostBSD this appears as two separate 500GB drives. I have GhostBSD installed on one of the 500GB drives and the other 500GB drive is empty. GhostBSD is snappy on this Surface Pro 6. I'm saving that empty drive for a possible de-Googled android OS in the future if it becomes available. I have JMP.Chat and it is my daily phone app (Cheogram) on my Graphene_OS Pixel phone.
Why did I not leave the linux-surface install on it? I was trying to get a version of Android over to the empty drive and things did not go well. I could not boot or repair any drive. I tried Windows 10 and 11 recovery disks, Pop!OS, FreeBSD, MSDOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Proxmox, pfSense, and all of the disk tricks at my disposal. Only GhostBSD worked and this was the first time I tried it on anything. I've been trying to migrate to BSD and this was perfect. GhostBSD will stay on one of the drives on my Surface Pro 6. The GhostBSD installation USB worked with no problems when nothing else would work. I used the custom partitioning feature in the GhostBSD installation USB to wipe everything and that was the trick. I also used the option rEFInd "boot manager". I like that. The GhostBSD install USB is a very handy tool to keep around. I used the "Popsicle" USB app in Pop!OS (Ubuntu) to make the GhostBSD USB installation drive. The partition erasing and rEFInd made this all work for me. I did not try any other installation method and won't.
I have a recent GhostBSD install on my HP t740 Thin Client. It works great. My PC stays cool and quiet and there have been no problems. With Debian on this HP t740 first, I was still getting boot problems and had to Ctrl-Alt-Delete alot to reboot. All of the OSes mentioned above were used on this t740 and I still had problems of some kind and mostly boot problems even with BIOS settings (Secure Boot Off, etc) set to the recommended settings. GhostBSD loaded right up with no problems and is still working fine. All of the BSDs, except FreeBSD, would not boot after installation and NetBSD had hexadecimal garbage on the screen. FreeBSD would boot into the terminal with no desktop but still had boot problems. I could never get a desktop going with FreeBSD with all of the instructions on all of the sites I had read. I still have alot to learn about everything. GhostBSD has snappy performance. This is my daily driver now.
Maybe one day, that linux-surface work (including the pen) for the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 Tablet can find its way to GhostBSD! This tablet is a nice quality unit with a metal case.
Thank you to all involved in the GhostBSD project!
