Enable creation of vm on headless machine with VNC console

[rritterson]

I have a CM5 connected without any display output running Ubuntu Server. I'd love to get an ARM instance setup but can't use BVM because there is no display. Could the script be modified to run headless with a VNC console, or, ideally, with libvirt? (libvirt has a build-in connection to cockpit-machines, so I can manage VMs that way)

[Botspot]

This seems out-of-scope for BVM at this time, and it's probably something better achieved by the end user or by another tool.

I would recommend you do one of the following:

• Add some lines to config.txt that force hdmi hotplug and set a screen resolution. This is what I do for headless pies, and allows me to use Pi Connect for GUI usage when needed, and SSH the rest of the time.
• Run a nested Wayland desktop session for the sole purpose of using BVM. I did this with the adopt-a-developer project, which could run an entire browser on Pi OS lite. So for you, a command that may work and could give you a starting point would be labwc -C /dev/null -s 'echo $WAYLAND_DISPLAY $DISPLAY 1>&2; bvm gui'. From another shell, you could set WAYLAND_DISPLAY and DISPLAY to the right values in order to run a VNC server inside this nested wayland display.