Possible to temporarily have armbian boot into headless mode?

[Jon Ashley]

Hi,

 

Orange PI Lite

Armbian 5.25 (latest download available at the time of this post)

ARMBIAN 5.25 stable Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS 3.4.113-sun8i

 

I would like to have the Pi boot without the desktop environment, and either start it manually over SSH.

 

I found a tutorial that said to edit /etc/default/grub and change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text" but that file does not apply, so I'm not sure how to impliment this for armbian.

 

I don't want to remove the desktop environment completely, but rather have it bootup to command line only, and if I need the desktop environment log into via SSH and either re-edit "a file" and reboot, or preferably run a command to then start/open the desktop environment.

 

 

Is this possible?

 

Thank you,

Jonathan

[Igor]

There is no grub ...

 

Permanent change - check:

/etc/default/nodm

Per request:

 

service nodm start / stop

[vtrandal]

And now there is no nodm? I'm spending a lot of time trying to install different desktops and running out of swap space when running apps like web browser.

So now I see armbian-config has default module for desktop which I am installing now. Why this approach? It must be a lot of work to keep armbian-config working correctly instead of using apt for installing software.

Edited January 20, 2019 by vtrandal
armbian-config has what I need

[Igor]

5 hours ago, vtrandal said:

And now there is no nodm? 

The reason behind removing nodm is we are getting the same with lightdm (autologin) and have less complications.  nodm also have some bugs which are here for years and nobody care to fix them. Our resources are far too small to deal with bugs in 3rd party packages. 

Current desktop builds still have nodm, while in next major update, it is gone. While the functionality remain unchanged.

[vtrandal]

Thank you for fast reply. Overall, Armbian is excellent and my comment is somewhat misinformed. The more I use armbian-config the more I like it. I used armbian-config to install minimal desktop on Armbian_5.65_Orangepi-r1_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.14.78 and Debian too. The lightdm service would not start so I installed gdm3 using apt. After installing minimal desktop using armbian-config the RDP option shows up in armbian-config and it works for Ubuntu but not Debian.

Edited January 22, 2019 by vtrandal
make corrections and simplify my comments

[vtrandal]

This experience has motivated me to find where zramctl is being called during boot and replace it with a very large swapfile so my system (Orange Pi R1) does not run out of virtual memory.

1. I have not yet found where/how zramctl is being used during boot/startup to create swap space. So I must learn about how the boot sequence is performed to find this information.

2. I would like to search the filesystem for zramctl but searching on the target is slow and grep has segmentation faults. I want to search the filesystem on development host (where I compile Armbian).

 

Those are my wishes from this experience. I will read the documentation to learn more and look for answers to these two questions in the forum.

 

Thank you for making Armbian available. It is amazing. It is very good. I have no complaints. Only praise for Armbian and the people who make it available. Thank you.

[Igor]

On 1/20/2019 at 10:59 AM, vtrandal said:

the RDP option shows up in armbian-config and it works for Ubuntu but not Debian.

 

This is somehow expected in the Debian/Ubuntu jungle. That's why we provide both. Some applications works (better) in one, some in the other. In some cases, you need to fix things to get them working ...
 

2 hours ago, vtrandal said:

and replace it with a very large swapfile so my system (Orange Pi R1) does not run out of virtual memory.

Do you have any idea how much slower is this implementation? What are you doing that this can happen? If you really need more swap, you can add a file to it. You can have both.

 

See files in /usr/lib/armbian/