Raspberry Pi OS on the Surface RT

[wove]

The Surface RT was the first high quality tablet I purchased. It was a very nice device and I am probably one of only three people in the world that liked it. Microsoft very ignominiously dumped it and support for it. As a last in your face move their final security update, closed off the boot loader jail break hack, so not only would MS no longer support the device, but they also made it so you could not install anything else on it.

Since my laptop project is on hold until my order gets here, I figured I would see what could be done with the RT besides just tossing it away. This site <https://openrt.gitbook.io/open-surfacert/> is a wealth of information about the Surface RT including directions for installing the Raspberry Pi OS on the device. Overall it is not difficult, but damn it is tedious. To get past the locked boot loader you need to download and re-flash the original Windows 8 image for the device. Then you can run the jail break. And then you can create a Pi installer USB device and run the PiOS. Finally you need to run Pi OS on the RT and copy the USB to the internal EMMC. Give yourself a few hours.

RaspberryPi OS runs well on the Surface RT. From a hardware standpoint it is about equivalent to a Pi2-3, so there is a lot it is simply too underpowered to handle. I am thinking I should remake my USB image to install the base Pi image, and move my NextCloud server over to it. The RT has an SD card slot that could be used for file storage, it really does not use much more power and it has a built in screen so I could access it directly rather than via ssh. Using velcro I could hang it on the wall beside the router. And of course I would then get my Pi back to try other stuff. A Raspberry Pi is a much more versatile device than a Surface RT.

[dai_trying]

I had never thought to put Pi OS on anything other than a Pi but it sounds like an interesting thing to do with an old device, I only just checked the specs of the RT and it is very similar to a Pi so looks like a good fit, I do love when re-purposing old devices makes them usable again. Kudos to you!