Ubuntu without Physical monitor attached for Remote VNC

If your Linux machine does not boot without attached to a monitor then you can follow this article to make things work.

If you are using Linux system only for remote desktop access then you may not require a monitor attached to it and you can access your system through RDP or VNC viewer.

Here we will show you how to make your system work without monitor attached to it. For this example we have used Ubuntu to demonstrate.

NVIDIA as display manager

 

As shown in the above pic goto the monitor connected to your system. Here it is “CRT-1” and click on “Acquire EDID” button to export edid.bin file to /etc/X11 path.

We are going to refer this bin file in the xorg.conf file, before that we need to export xorg.conf file through NVIDIA settings like below.

Open Nvidia settings and navigate to “X Server Display Configuration” and the click on “Save to X Configuration File” to save this in path “/etc/X11/xorg.conf”

 

Edit Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to add below two Options

Option "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT-1"
Option "CustomEDID" "CRT-1:/etc/X11/edid.bin"

Example:

Section "Device"
Identifier     "Device0"
Driver         "nvidia"
VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName      "GeForce GTS 450"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT-1"
Option "CustomEDID" "CRT-1:/etc/X11/edid.bin"
EndSection

Once this is done you can restart your system and it will boot up and ready to work as a remote desktop machine without any monitor attached to it.

 

Intel GPU as display manager

To get EDID file of you rmonitor you can install package read-edid like below

sudo apt install read-edid edid-decode

Use below command to export EDID file to current location

sudo get-edid -m 0 > edid.bin

 

As detailed in the NVIDIA section you can refer this edid.bin file under xorg.conf to make Linux boot without monitor attached.