Text mode console on headless KVM connected VPS.

19/01/2020 - Ted

VPS and Dedicated servers quite often come with a method to access their console via some form of Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) access. This is incredibly useful when you've just firewalled yourself out, or managed to screw the server up the pooch.

Unfortunately, by default, almost every distribution of Linux available at these hosting providers comes with a graphical console either all the way from the start, or mid-way through which takes what should be a fast, clean, easy to read boot process and makes it look "pretty"!

Here's everything that is needed to be done to a Debian 9/Devuan 2 system to kill off a graphical console with extreme prejudice.

Prevent the console going black
When the console was a physical screen, this made sense to avoid the login shell text burning into the CRT screen while it was left in a corner for years. Now that they're virtual there is zero point to not always displaying the console.

Remove the blackout timer by adding consoleblank=0 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub

Show everything during boot
With the parameters quiet and splash set, the boot process is covered by an annoying splash screen, and boot messages are suppressed. That makes trying to see what is going wrong with the boot process quite difficult!

Remove both of those parameters from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT

Boot to console, not X.
You have X installed on a server??

Uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console in /etc/default/grub

*Might* have to add text to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT too.

Stop the video mode and font changing
Even in text mode console, the graphical console sometimes kicks in when the display font is changed. Why do you need a different font on the console? I have no idea.
  1. Add text nomodeset to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
  2. Edit /etc/default/console-setup and make sure that FONTFACE=, FONTFACE=, and VIDEOMODE= are all set to empty strings.
  3. Because that last one sometimes doesn't work, prevent console-set.sh from running (in initv).

Run update-grub if you've made any changes!

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