Surface Pro Installation

Question

Hello all and it's good to be back. I haven't used Arch in a few years or linux for that fact as everything at work required OSX or Windows. Things have changed and I've been able to switch back to Linux. I've been running Ubuntu on my Surface Pro (kinda) but miss the streamlined Arch distro. So I've been doing a little research and last night decided to pull the trigger. I made a bootable SD card image and booted the image. I made it through setting up the wireless (I thought). Set up the partitions and entered the
pacstrap -i /mnt base command
I get a screen full of error: failed retrieving file ....
ip link show mlan0
returns
mlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
ping -c 3 www.google.com
ping: unknown host www.google.com
I had read in a thread somewhere that they feel the Marvell wifi was loading but not fully. I can use wifi-menu and see the wireless networks and choose one. I do have the latest firmware from Marvell (usb8797_uapsta.bin) but I don't know how to load it for the live image. So I would like to use this thread to address all the surface pro issues for installation with hopes of eventually creating a surface pro install wiki. To address later down the road, my power cover doesn't work as a keyboard. It works in the boot menu from the SD card but not once the image loads. I've just been using my Apple usb keyboard. Also I have a Netgear WMA1000M usb wifi adapter but that doesn't even show up in iw dev. Granted that is connected to the USB hub built into the Apple keyboard and lsusb does see booth the hub and the WMA1000M. So any help would be greatly appreciated.
Last edited by decaren (2014-04-13 17:54:19)

Answer 1

I made it through install this morning.  I'm running KDE and so far so good.  I'm no further with hardware then I was a couple of days ago.  I've pretty much spent all day trying to figure out where I go from here.  I still have no keyboard and worst of all I have no wifi again.  Now that I'm booting into KDE I'm using NetworkManager instead of dhcpcd.  But of course NetworkManager scans pretty much the first thing it does.  So back to the original issues, if the card scans it no longer will connect to the wifi.  I could work around this if I only connected to one network.  Unfortunately I will be connecting to no less than 12 networks with work depending on which of the 12 locations I am working at that day.  So does anyone have any idea on this one? 
On another note, still no power cover keyboard.  I don't care as much about the trackpad (I actually turn it off in Windows) because the touch screen worked out of the box and after installing Bluez 5.17 the Arc Mouse Surface Edition works as well.  I could only find one topic on the forum about the surface keyboard covers and it pointed to an Ubuntu forum topic.  I read through that and was stopped at one section for seeing the input. 
# cat /dev/hidrawX
That should have allowed me to see the input from what I understand but nothing.  I had one that had my current keyboard.  I'm thoroughly confused on that issue as well. 
Other than that everything else seems to be working for the most part.  Bluetooth is a little sketchy coming out of sleep and pen input doesn't work which I was never excited about anyway.  But the keyboard and wifi are my biggest issues.  It looks funny carrying a surface with a separate USB keyboard and having to save files and boot into Windows to send them sucks.  I have to do the same thing with OSX, but at least if I could get a working keyboard in all the OS's I could use a USB wifi dongle for a while.  The keyboard does work in OSX though.