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View Full Version : [lubuntu] Booting with no monitor - grub question



fmouse
February 19th, 2012, 01:02 AM
I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 on a desktop system. If my monitor is on, everything boots nicely as it's supposed to.

When I'm away from home I turn off everything including my monitor, my Ubuntu desktop system - everything except my Linux in-house router/gateway. I have a VPN to said router/gateway, and can run a wake-on-LAN command to bring up my desktop box so I can get to files I need on it. If my monitor is on, this works fine, the system comes up, and I can ssh into the desktop box and do what I need to do. If my monitor is off, however, the system won't boot. I found out that in this state, grub has presented a text-mode menu to what it thinks is the effective terminal, and is waiting for a response, which it won't get since the network isn't up at that point. It's either hung, or waiting with a very long timeout.

I used to configure grub all the time, but don't have the bandwidth to figure out the rather complex bootloader file collection use by the grub-pc installed in Ubuntu 11.04. Can anyone tell me how I can tell grub-pc in this Ubuntu to boot normally if there's no monitor connected to the box?

SteveDee
February 19th, 2012, 09:44 AM
I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 on a desktop system.... Can anyone tell me how I can tell grub-pc in this Ubuntu to boot normally if there's no monitor connected to the box?

No, but I did have a similar problem prior to version 10.10.

So this may be a long shot, but I created a simple configuration like this:-


Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
HorizSync 31.5-48.5
VertRefresh 50-70
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "800x600"
EndSubSection
EndSection

...and put it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

If you don't have a /etc/X11/xorg.conf it should be safe to create one with the above text. If you do have one, save a copy as /etc/X11/xorg.confOld or something.