Disable/Hide "monitor" for StandaloneVM's

[Thomas Clarke]

Greetings fellow Qubes enthusiasts,

I find myself often in a situation where I often do not need the display window of an StandaloneVM. This is often because I have opted to SSH or RDP into it from another AppVM. Obviously one solution is just to keep the window minimised, however I would like to completely disable it for a given StandaloneVM.

The only thing I found which I thought would work was `qvm-features {nameOfQube} video-model none` but contrary to the docs on `qvm-features` stating "For available values see libvirt documentation about <video><model type=…> element: https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsVideo" it appears there is a check enforced somewhere that only accepts certain values. Running the Qube after setting `video-model` to `none` returns `Start failed: unsupported configuration: unknown video model 'none', see /var/log/libvirt/libxl/libxl-driver.log for details` (it is worth noting also, that no error message is logged to that file).

Any input on achieving my goal would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
Tonux

[Thomas Clarke]

Actually going to answer my own question here.

So the libvirt version used by Qubes R4 is too old to accept `none` as `video-model`. However I can force stop a display window by creating a custom .xml in `/etc/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen/by-name` and commenting out/removing `<graphics type="qubes"/>`.

Sorry to clutter the mailing list, hopefully Qubes R4.1 has a newer libvirt version!

Tonux