How to get the standard Pi terminal prompt (HDMI + keyboard)?

Building Zynthian
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Hi. My Zynthian is works and sounds great. But I want to see the standard Pi display terminal (to be able to start the graphics display through the HDMI). In my experience with RPIs in the past, once it is booted up the HDMI displays a login prompt, which can then be used to run startx etc. With the Zynthian, the hdmi display shows all the boot logs, but then goes blank with a single underline at the top left, and is unresponsive to keyboard input. Is this deliberate - would it clash with the midi input? Should I enable another USB port somehow in /etc/config.txt, if so what should I put?

Thanks

David

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Currently the Zynthian-UI blocks that. I think it shouldn’t be difficult to change, but i never did it because i always access by SSH and it’s not very useful for me. But please, you are very invited to improve that :wink:

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At least I know, thanks. Basically I’m trying to get access to the GUI part of the RPI so I can see the interfaces to all the synths (and install my PianoTech licence). Ive tried to use ssh and putty (with X forwarding and running a X server on my PC) but nothing is giving me the RPI desktop. The best I can do is to startx via putty and I get the login prompt on the Zynthian screen itself! Interesting but not really what I want :slight_smile:

If you have any thoughts on how I can get to see the RPI GUI then I would be grateful.

David

1 Like
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I just tried that on a Windows machine last night.
Install xming and run it (not xlaunch) before you login via putty. x11 forwarding enabled, no DISPLAY setting needed

3 Likes
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Got it, thank you. (I was using XLaunch)

1 Like
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I think this is because the RPi auto-logs in then launches a X session to host Zynthian. I find this confusing because screens go blank sometimes as you switch VTs. I might take a look at this. Maybe running Zynthian via a boot task rather than a user task? (I am not in front of a box to verify any of this.)

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Zynthian is already started as a system service …

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Yep! Sorry - I see that now. It seems that when switching virtual console with ctrl+alt + Fn the zynthian application stops responding. I don’t understand why yet. Might be something to do with keyboard / mouse focus but I don’t see why that would stop the app running and encoder input stopping working. More investigation required.