That sounds very promising, I’ll look into it!

Debian is my favorite as well. I prefer KDE, though, because it is pretty. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I just don’t love it as much and at this point KDE is way more familiar.

Thank you! Once I can figure out the margins I’m going to get a custom btop preset configured. Right now I can’t configure it in a way that important info isn’t cut off on the edges.

The TV does have dials to adjust, but only slightly, and if I adjust too much, it messes up the scan lines and the signal doesn’t come through clearly. I feel like the answer is just a little further down the rabbit hole of kernel params :)

Thank you! I’m very happy with it, and I learned a lot. If I can figure out the margin thing I will definitely try to set up a fancier looking monitor, but right now htop is the most legible because of how it is displayed. Mainly just menu labels get cut off

This was really helpful - It got me pointed down the right track to figure out the video= settings in the grub config. I was able to disable the laptop monitor and enable the CRT by adding this to /etc/default/grub

# Disable laptop monitor (LVDS-1) and only output to CRT (HDMI-A-1)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="video=LVDS-1:d video=HDMI-A-1:1024x768"

I initially set it to 640x480, but display was better with higher res and large font size, which I scales up with sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

I created a service account for this, and set up a systemd service to start getty on that account based on those docs

[Service]
Type=idle
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --skip-login --noreset --noclear --autologin axies - ${TERM}![](https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/cf0ab3f3-9674-4578-a230-c8f3df7a7bdc.webp)

Then I added htop to the ~/.bash_profile for that user and… done!

Only thing is there is some overscan on the display and initially about 3 rows / cols were cut off on each side. I was able to adjust the CRT display itself to mostly mitigate this, so now only a bit is cut off and it’s usable, but it’s not perfect. I tried setting the margin in the video options in grub with margin_top, margin_left etc., as per these docs but that didn’t work, even though I verified the resolution was applying correctly. But it is functional!

You mean like using a separate computer to display? I thought about that. Actually this old thing has a battery compartment with enough space to fit a raspberry pi inside so I may try and make it a self contained PC at some point. Would be cool to have it monitor multiple servers and display a status dashboard when they’re up. That sounds like a fun future project :)

I was trying to start the monitoring program as part of the systemd service. Idk why I didn’t think to use the bash profile on a service account. That should work perfect! Thanks

This is great info, thanks! I did some messing around yesterday and got it opening a tty on boot, and disabled the startx so it stays there. I will look into the monitor power stuff too. Thanks!

I do get a tty and that works fine if I start it manually. I can also ssh into it while on my local network.

I think what I need to configure is to have it automatically start a tty at boot with specific credentials and auto start whatever monitoring I want. That should work I think. The only downside of that is I don’t want it to run on the laptop screen at all, only the hdmi output, so that is where I want to learn more about how all of those display interfaces work on linux so I can configure the service accordingly (I think)

That definitely looks like it is in the direction I want to go. I’ll read those docs. I do have getty on mint so I’ll do some testing

From what I know, headless means different things depending on context - in this instance I’m using it in the sense that my server does not require any user session, or any user input devices, it just powers on and all of the services start up at the system level. I can SSH into it to configure things, but it doesn’t require any user session or input to run the services. A video output probably falls outside of this in some sense, but I would like it to be automatic without requiring an active user session.

The monitor I have is an old Panasonic tv / radio combo, so the display can be flipped on with a physical switch when I’m at my desk, so shouldn’t be any wasted power usage. It won’t be on all the time.

I’m using Linux Mint, which is probably not optimal, but I had a USB ready and I’m just using terminal stuff so it didn’t seem like it mattered too much. It does have systemd, which made it pretty easy to set up the docker stuff

Thanks for the input!

I have an older nvidia card (1070) and had more of an issue than that getting the correct version of the driver installed for my card, and getting it to use the correct driver instead of the open source one that didn’t work well. It’s also possible I was doing something wrong. But yeah, it’s definitely doable, and it’s not too bad, but it’s fiddly compared to the ubuntu driver gui or something like bazzite that works out of the box with it.

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t buy a new laptop for a server, but it’s a great way to re-use what would otherwise be e-waste. I have a 20 year old laptop running as a server, currently just for FoundryVTT, but it works great. 4GB of DDR2 ram, Intel celeron dual core cpu. I stuck a new ssd in it (old hdd died) and it works great, as long as I don’t run any graphical interfaces while I have the server running. One ram stick was bad, but DDR2 cost me about $11. Total hardware cost was around $50 USD.

Thinking about just removing the lid entirely, since I don’t use it graphically (I can hook up a monitor if absolutely needed).

I have used gnome, plasma, and xfce and they are all fine. I prefer KDE personally but they’re all going to do what you need to do. It’s all down to personal aesthetic preference, and picking one won’t hinder you in any real way. KDE to me just looks super nice out of the box for my taste, and I like the customization.

I love Debian. Been using it on my laptop for over a year. Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics but it’s not too bad, lots of good info on the debian wiki.

It’s always something 😅

That sounds really frustrating. When my 1070 croaks I’m going with an AMD. Probably not going to upgrade before then since I mostly play older games and GPUs are just too expensive these days. First it was crypto mining, now it’s AI… I just want to play my single player RPGs!

That sucks. I have definitely had issues with certain hardware on other machines. Even with this Bazzite install, sleep doesn’t work (thanks to my Gigabyte MB, as the other poster mentioned) and I have some weird behavior with ethernet, but my asus wifi card is working fine, thankfully, and that didn’t work properly on windows when I tried it before I stopped dual booting.

Hopefully you can find something that works well with your setup. The most frustrating issues to debug are ones with support for some specific hardware that isn’t widely used by other Linux users, and may not ever be fully supported. Now that I am fully on linux, next time I upgrade I’m going to try to find components that are proven to work, and will probably be avoiding both Gigabyte and nVidia.

“Install this bloated spyware in exchange for a little bit of convenience” is like 80% of modern tech and I don’t know how people are just ok with that

Huh, I may look into this. Sounds neat. Thanks!