Disabling the Desktop GUI

Hello, i am trying to disable the GUI to train ssd-mobilenet on the Jetson orin nano following ‘jetson-inference/docs/pytorch-transfer-learning.md at master · dusty-nv/jetson-inference · GitHub
I did not mount any swap because i was only trying to run a batch of 4 with 2 workers. but when i run the command ‘sudo init 3’ the screen shuts off and it never comes back on.

Earlier today i had to reflash jetpack because i changed the settings to permanently do it on reboot until i disabled it again, so the screen never turned back on and i didnt know how to reverse it, although i probably could have tried headless.

i did overclock the jetson before running ‘sudo init 3’ the first time. I mention this because i also have a jetson nano and was able to run it without a GUI once and then activated the GUI to be able to overclock the jetson nano and when i tried to run it without a GUI again the screen never booted up anymore.

any help on why i cant have a screen come up once i try to disable the GUI?

Hi @castej10, can you try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 or F2/F3/ect ? It should bring up a login prompt. You can also try ssh’ing into it and change it back.

PyTorch training takes up a lot of memory and I would still mount swap (preferably on NVMe) and run with --batch-size=1 at first to check that it can run.

Hello Dusty,

thanks for the reply, could you point me in the right direction to how i would mount swap on NVMe?

once i enter the command sudo init 3 the screen goes dark and it shutsdown because its not receiving any input from the orin nano. i press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or F2 or F3 or ect but nothing happens.

It’s essentially the same process as here
, just make sure that the directory you allocate your swapfile in is on your NVMe drive. Also you will want your NVMe drive mounted at boot (you can do this by making an entry for it in /etc/fstab or by doing it through the Disks GUI utility)

The sudo init 3 method doesn’t persist across reboot, so after you reboot the GUI and display should return to normal. If that doesn’t happen, and you are unable to SSH into it, my guess is that the SD card filesystem got corrupted somehow (perhaps from intense levels of disk swapping). If this keeps happening, you might want to check the health or smart data of your SD card (it might have damaged sectors and need replaced)

yes sorry for the cofusion, ever since i reflashed the orin nano i was able to gewt the GUI and display back, and once i try to sudo init 3 (and it doesnt work, the screen just shuts off) i end up having to unplug and plug back in to be able to get the GUI and display back just fine.

my problem is i cannot disable the GUI and be able to perform the training.

thank you for your time Dusty.

OK gotcha - since you are on Orin Nano (presumably the one with 8GB RAM), I would mount swap first and see if that helps. Also, try remotely connecting to your board over SSH (if you have a Windows laptop/PC, you can easily use a SSH client like Putty or mobaxterm). Then the display doesn’t matter. Typically I use the sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target command to persistently disable the GUI, except in your case I would only do this after you can SSH to change it back if you need to.

Perfect thank you Dusty