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!

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!

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!

I love Debian. Been using it on my laptop for over a year. Some specific drivers are a little fiddly if you have nvidia graphics but it's not too bad, lots of good info on the debian wiki.

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.

pretty

I love the magic system in Genesys, with just basic spells (attack, heal, augment, curse, etc), some varying effects with suggested flavor (e.g. "Ice" adds ensnare to an attack, but mechanically it doesn't matter if it is vines, goop, whatever), and how much that effect increases spell difficulty. It lets the players go into a brainstorming session trying to come up with a spell to get out of a very specific situation, and having the game support almost anything.

E.g. this create water idea could be an attack spell with the poisonous quality (making it a hard check), which requires the target to make a hard resilience check or take a bunch of extra damage and strain, which for a skilled mage against a non-boss creature (e.g. an overly ambitious bandit) is well within one-shot range. If they pass the check, they would still take damage from the attack, but would be able to cough up most of the water before it got too serious.

This system sounds very cool also, and I have recently heard of Mage in another thread. I would like to play a system that gives players the ability to come up with spells that the GM doesn't know ahead of time (I seriously dislike long lists of predefined spells), but also has a little more of that hard magic-science set of rules to satisfy my inner Sanderson fanboy. I have built in some external scaffolding around the magic in my Genesys setting that does this, and it has been a ton of fun so far.

My main gripe is that I wish I had more time to play RPGs (more than a couple sessions a month) so I could try out more systems.

But have you tried Outlook (NEW) and Teams (NEW)?? Microsoft made changes to deeply integrate copilot into them, while making the UI unintelligible and broken as well. It's a much more authentic Windows experience

I'm the guy but instead of a pyramid scheme I'm just trying to get all of my friends to install Linux and switch to fediverse social platforms

Aunt Jemima was on the syrup. Mrs Butterworth is the syrup

AI art is unethical