What's giving you trouble? The Arch wiki is recommended for everyone, some things you have to make a little different but the general instructions should work.

[–] atocci 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm trying to run a headless Minecraft server, but I didn't know the terminal well enough to run the server without the GUI. When I unplug the monitor from the computer though, I lose the video in my VNC viewer too. Windows would run the desktop all the time, even without a monitor connected, but it looks like the default behavior in Linux is to shut it down when there's nothing connected. I've been trying to find workarounds to make the computer think I have a monitor plugged in all afternoon, but none of the things I've tried are working.

On the other hand, after 4 hours of trying things, I figured out the terminal well enough to start the server over SSH, so the outcome is the same I guess

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

What DE are you using? Different DEs handle VNC differently if you're using Wayland as opposed to X11.

Also, what exactly don't you know that you would need to know to run the server without a GUI? If you already know how to SSH and start the server that way (or better idea -- create a systemd service for it (I can show you how to do that)) and you just need to launch the server without a head attached, just modify your startup script to do java -jar minecraft_whatever_server.jar nogui. If you want to run Minecraft commands from the server console while headless, you can type them directly into the terminal while the server is running. If you set up the Minecraft server with systemd, you won't have a terminal, so I'd recommend using Rcon/mcrcon instead. It's built into the vanilla server and not too tough to set up. I'll show you how if you like.

If all else fails, of course, there's always the low-tech solution: Amazon sells "HDMI dummy plugs", dongles that plug into an HDMI port and pretend there's a monitor connected. If you're anything like me, though, that solution won't satisfy you, so I'm here to help if you need help getting some combination of the above working.

[–] atocci 1 points 4 months ago

I think Pop_OS uses Gnome by default, and I haven't changed it. I suppose it wasn't really the server's GUI I needed, I juat wanted a desktop environment in general so I could start and configure the server in a familiar way. Really, the only thing I figured I needed VNC for was double-clicking the startup script and editing text files. I'm starting to understand this was a pretty inefficient way to run a server though... I think I'll give up on the VNC idea since it sounds like there are much better ways to do this. I'll look into systemd and rcon next, thanks!