Ubuntu 20.04 cannot detect the battery in Surface pro 6 laptop

I installed Ubuntu 20.04 (kernel 5.10) on my surface pro 6. Everything works with no issue except the Battery status/percentage is not detected (I already have played with the 'tweaks' battery percentage key). Also when I run "acpi -a", I get this "Adapter 0: off-line". Any idea what is missing?

1 Answer

According to the linux-surface project's feature Matrix, the battery status works after installing the surface kernel.

Follow these steps to install this special kernel (I found these steps on this page. Please refer to that page for more details. If you encounter an issue, you can report it in the GitHub issues).

First you need to import the keys.

$ wget -qO - \ | gpg --dearmor | sudo dd of=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/linux-surface.gpg

Now add the repository configuration

$ echo "deb [arch=amd64] release main" \ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linux-surface.list

Now update APT.

$ sudo apt update

Now you can install the linux-surface kernel and its dependencies. You should also enable the iptsd service for touchscreen support.

$ sudo apt install linux-image-surface linux-headers-surface iptsd libwacom-surface

$ sudo systemctl enable iptsd

After that you can install the secureboot key of the linux-surface team.

$ sudo apt install linux-surface-secureboot-mok

The linux-surface kernel will be installed alongside the default kernel provided by the distribution. This way you have a backup kernel you can use if something goes wrong. The bootloader will pick up the kernel by default, but you should update its configuration to make sure it was recognized.

$ sudo update-grub

Finally, reboot your system and you should boot into the linux-surface kernel.