Headless Installation?

[Florian Rist]

Hi,
thanks again for your answers reagarding the number of steppers, now I found my old BeagleBone Black and I'd like to try it, but I don't have a miroHDMI adapter, so I'm headless - for now.

Is there a way to do a headless install?

I was able to find a lot of things on headless operation, but not much on installation.

See you
Flo

[Viesturs Lācis]

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 4:55:55 PM UTC+3, Florian Rist wrote:

Hi,
thanks again for your answers reagarding the number of steppers, now I found my old BeagleBone Black and I'd like to try it, but I don't have a miroHDMI adapter, so I'm headless - for now.

Well, I do not use that microhdmi either (I would suspect that most of us do not) - I connect to BBB from laptop through ssh with X-forwarding, so basically I have BBB's screen on my laptop and that is how I do all the installation of Machinekit, editing config and also running Machinekit (I hope to switch to Machineface eventually). This might be useful starting point:

https://learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/ssh-to-beaglebone-black-over-usb.pdf

In Ubuntu I simply opened terminal and ran this command:

ssh -Y 192.168.7.2 -l machinekit

[Viesturs Lācis]

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 4:55:55 PM UTC+3, Florian Rist wrote:

Is there a way to do a headless install?

Or did you mean getting a Debian image on microsd card? 

[Alexander Rössler]

Or use Emacs and tramp to the bone ;)

I agree most of use what you call a headless installation.

--
Alexander

[Stephen Edwards]

You can also run it via "vncserver" and connect using ultravnc or similar clients from your desktop/laptop. Only downside is that you have to change the DISPLAY attribute to tkemc in the .ini file for it to work out of the box with vnc. Needs more work to get gscreen working.

[Gildo]

You can dump a machinekit disk image to a µSD card and then you are basically done with the installation.

To get a remote view of the BBB screen I tried several techniques each one with its pros and cons:

• X11 forward through SSH, as Viersturs suggested, it's very easy if you use a Mac or a Linux as your main computer, for windows you should install cygwin (but I have no experience with that). This is what I normally use.
• tightVNC: First install tightVNC with
  
  sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
  
  then you can edit the LightDM config file ( /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf ) modifying the following lines:
  
  [VNCServer]
  enabled=true
  port=5900
  width=1024
  height=768
  depth=8
  
  This creates a new instance of the desktop every time you connect to the BBB, so you have to keep your computer connected to it while it's working. Plus the Axis GUI does not work with tightvnc, I am not sure why.
  https://mike632t.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/remote-desktop-vnc/
  
• x11vnc: install x11vnc
  
  sudo apt-get install x11vnc
  
  then run this at startup:
  
  /usr/bin/x11vnc -bg -o %HOME/.x11vnc.log.%VNCDISPLAY -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -forever
  
  This copies on VNC the content of the main X11 server and thus if you disconnect from it and reconnect the desktop would be already there

When you are done with the configuration you could use mklauncher and machine-client to run remotely linuxcnc.

https://github.com/strahlex/QtQuickVcp/wiki/Using-mklauncher