Can’t use my PC without a monitor plugged in

[depechefan]

Hi,

Just installed Linux Mint 22.1 on a laptop PC as well as a desktop PC. My plan is to have the desktop PC be headless running as a media server. I have installed NoMachine on both PCs. When I connect from the laptop to the desktop with a monitor plugged into the desktop PC everything works as expected. I have configured screen resolution to be the same on both.

When I unplug the monitor from the desktop PC the screen is mostly unresponsive and I can’t get to the “task bar” (I used to run Windows so…). I can right-click on the desktop and open a shell but that is about it. Is there anything I can do to resolve this?

Thanks in advance

/M

[Britgirl]

NoMachine works out-of-the-box with headless machines. It does this by detecting that an x server is not running and creates its own. But a specific case which can lead to black screen or white screen or frozen screen on Linux is when the X server is running but it is not rendering because the video card is turned off (i.e you detach the monitor). In this case NoMachine doesn’t use its own virtual display because it detects that the X server is still running. You should therefore disable the x server first and then connect with NoMachine.

More about headless Linux hosts here: https://kb.nomachine.com/AR03P00973
To disable the X server permanently for example:

sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

To enable it again:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

After disabling or re-enabling always restart the nx service sudo /etc/NX/nxserver --restart

[Author]

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