I’m very new to Zynthian and raspberry pi use in general so please assume I don’t know anything. I have a raspberry pi 5 with a HiFiberry DAC hat running the stable oram release. I’m trying to run it headless but the real VNC viewer (installed as per Beginners Headless Zynthian Tutorial) will only display when the unit is booted with a display connected. I have tried to edit the config.txt in both the /boot/ and /boot/firmware directories to force HDMI on but this hasn’t work.
Any thoughts on this? Even better if you can suggest a way to make HDMI1 port active.
Otherwise I’m enjoying learning the zynthian!
Hi @RMunn! Welcome to the zynthian family.
First - DO NOT INSTALL VNC MANUALLY!!!
VNC is already installed on zynthian and installing another version will likely break it. To get VNC running on zynthian:
- Install a fresh Oram image.
- Boot and wait for reboot to complete.
- Connect via network (direct or via hub) with browser to http://zynthian.local.
- HARDWARE->Display: Select Generic HDMI/DSI Display then save.
- INTERFACE->UI Options: Enable VNC Server then save
- Reboot.
You should now have access to the zynthian UI via http://zynthian.local:6080/vnc.html.
Please try this and if it fails, come back and we can look at what may have broken recently. 
[Edit] However… you are right that zynthian refuses to start without a display which seems to be a regression. Let’s look into that…
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This has been reported as issue 664 but not yet been progressed.
Micro hdmis are a nasty little connector.
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Thanks @riban I wil try and get the native VNC running on a fresh image.
So I loaded a fresh image and can access the native VNC as long as I boot with a display attached. Hopefully this can be fixed to allow headless use.