PNY Card works with my GB X7! It’s a PNY Elite 32GB Micro SDHC

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 :)

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!

Just ordered an X7 and a PNY SD Card. I’ll post here as well when it comes in if they are working.

I almost ordered the SanDisk Ultra pictured, going to kick myself if the PNY doesn’t work and I have to order that one anyway :D

I miss the old tts voices and now everything is ai generated garbage :( Bring back the robot voices!

That’s why we use JavaScript on the front end, JavaScript on the back end, and you can streamline it even more by using JavaScript for the db layer too. After all, if you have too much data to be reasonably parsed in a single .json file, you are probably just architecting wrong.

Yeah absolutely. It’s a very different experience. I was just pointing out that they are other different reasons to prefer not to do residential service calls that don’t apply to retail. There are a lot of extra steps for retail but it’s all an established process. The guys I talk to that have done service call work all have absolutely insane stories.

I’ve talked with people in HVAC who have said the same. It’s much easier to provide a service to a business than random individuals.

However, this is different, as this is just a retail product. Micron doesn’t have to deal with the person who doesn’t pay after the job is done, or doesn’t lock their dog up because “he doesn’t bite, it will be fine” and it turns out to be an aggressive monster. This is just assembly line production that they already are set up to do.

I get that they have a limited number of inputs and they are just choosing to make as much money as possible. It sucks to see that go, though. Crucial has always been my go-to for RAM.

And then power toys shortcuts conflict with the standard shortcuts and requires a ton of fiddling and customizing configs. You know, the thing windows users always say is a reason they don’t want to use linux.

That should also come up in a reviews also. Not trying to imply one guy should get fired as a scapegoat, just talking from experience how much it sucks to know your code caused major issues.

So the actual outage comes down to pre-allocating memory, but not actually having error handling to gracefully fail if that limit is or will be exceeded… Bad day for whoever shows up on the git blame for that function

It does look very chonky, and not very aesthetically pleasing.

However, as a heavy user of the steam deck over the past year, I am super excited. The track pads and the extra inputs on the steam deck give so much flexibility to play games that otherwise wouldn’t work well with controller at all. I’m just hoping it feels better (or at least not worse) than the steam deck in terms of ergonomics. I plan on getting one for my desktop PC.