Setting up a headless Debian box

[Tim Chase]

Confirming what Henry penned.  Sometimes the BIOS will pause and wait
for you at attach a keyboard and press a key before continuing to
boot.  Sometimes, the BIOS will give you an option to boot anyways.

So if either (1) your BIOS doesn't care if your keyboard is attached,
or (2) your BIOS can care, but is set to ignore it during boot, then
you should be good to go.

If you do have an unfortunate BIOS that require a keyboard and
doesn't let you disable that check, you might have to plug in a
keyboard during boot, which you can then remove after its presence
has made the BIOS happy.

However, once the BIOS has handed off control to Linux, in Henry's
wise words, "Linux does not care". (smile)

-tim




On April 14, 2017, Henry Yen wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 12:15:38PM -0500, John J. Boyer wrote:
> > What I'm concerned about is whether the box will boot without a
> > keyboard. If I shut it down and later press the power button will
> > it boot?
> 
> Whether or not a box will boot without a keyboard is a function of
> the firmware/bios of the box. Typically there's a bios/setup
> selection option called "Halt On Error?", with choices of "All" or
> "All except keyboard". The former will prevent the box from booting
> if no keyboard is detected while the latter will not.
> 
> Linux does not care.
> 
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