surface-kit

Fixes and small apps that make Ubuntu good on a Surface Pro 7: working cameras, face login, auto-rotation, a document scanner, a usable mic, better touch and pen input, and a few touch-friendly apps.

Built for and tested on one machine: Surface Pro 7 (i5-1035G4), Ubuntu 26.04, GNOME 50 on Wayland, kernel 6.19.8-surface-3 from linux-surface, and a 7.4-rc1 kernel built from kernel/, which face login needs. It is not a one-click installer, and other models and kernels will need work. It replaces kernel modules and system packages, so read the README in each folder first.

What's here

Folder	What it does	State
camera/	Kernel modules for the Intel IPU4P camera hardware on 6.19, sensor and lens fixes	Rear and front cameras lock reliably. No infrared camera on this driver
kernel/	Builds 7.4-rc1 with the upstream IPU4P patches and our fixes	Rear, front and infrared cameras, rotation and suspend work
face/	Face login with Howdy through the infrared camera and its light	Works for sudo, the login screen and the lock screen, on the 7.4 kernel
libcamera/	libcamera rebuilt with autofocus, exposure, white balance, colour matrices, shading and denoise	Works
snapshot/	GNOME Camera with a document mode: page outline, crop, clean-up, multi-page PDF	Works
sensors/	Sensor hub driver for auto-rotation, safe across suspend	Works
rotate/	Rotation animation (GNOME Shell extension)	Works
touch/	iptsd tuning, palm rejection while writing, pen top-button keys	Works
mutter/	Mutter with a dot instead of an arrow under the pen	Works
audio/	Internal mic levels	Mic and speakers work
power/	Power button behaviour around suspend	Works
system/	Clock fix (the firmware loads a clock over a year behind at boot)	Works
shell/	GNOME Shell helper: focus-or-start an app, screenshot for Screen Ink. Face unlock animation	Works
apps/	Recorder, Pen settings, Screen Ink, Face settings	Work

Known problems

• Logging in by face leaves the GNOME keyring locked, because it needs your password to open. Apps that use it can ask for the password afterwards.
• Face login is a convenience, not extra security. Howdy's project says the same.
• After a touch on a fullscreen window, GNOME stops sending that window the pen. Screen Ink runs maximized because of this.
• If the sensor hub doesn't survive a sleep, the driver gives up on it and auto-rotation stays off until the next boot. That beats the alternative, which was a frozen machine.

Installing

Each folder has its own install.sh or build script, and its README says what it changes. Downloaded sources and build output live in vendor/, which isn't in this repo; camera/README.md lists where the kernel source, driver and firmware come from.

Rebuild after a kernel update:

camera/build.sh
sudo camera/install/install.sh
sudo sensors/install.sh

install-apt-hook.sh holds the rebuilt packages and runs check-updates.sh after apt update, which says when Ubuntu has something newer to rebuild on.

Windows driver data

camera/windows/*-ccm.yaml and the tuning built on them contain colour matrices read from the calibration files in Microsoft's Surface driver package, for the sensors in this machine. The Microsoft driver files themselves are not in this repo.

Credits

This stands on other people's work, above all linux-surface, iptsd, ruslanbay/ipu4-drivers, thisiscamk/sp7-ipu4-camera, libcamera, Howdy, and GNOME.

The infrared camera runs because of findings shared by loafecho and JValdivia23 in linux-surface discussion 1353.

How this was made

This project was made with AI assistance. I directed the work and tested it on my Surface Pro 7; most of the code, patches and documentation were written by Anthropic's Claude, mostly the Opus 5.5 model, through Claude Code. Commits carry a Co-Authored-By line saying so. Expect rough edges, and check anything you reuse.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later for the project's own code. Patches keep the licence of the project they change. See LICENSING.md.