Jetson Nano Headless Rendering

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson Systems Jetson Nano
6

I found a solution! Turns out the .Xauthority file was only readable by the user, which was at the root of the segfault. Here are the steps I took to enable a shared X server that is automatically started on a headless board.

  1. Switch from graphical target to multi-user target 
    > sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
  2. Create new dummy user that will auto login and launch X 
    > sudo adduser startup

    choose a password (can leave other fields blank)

  3. Add the following at the end of the dummy user's .bashrc to automatically start X on login 
    # Start X Server if no DISPLAY
if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ]
then
  DISPLAY=:0.0 glxinfo > /dev/null 2>&1
  if [ $? -ne 0 ]
  then
    echo "starting new x server at :0.0" > .xout.log
    startx -- :0 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
    sleep 5
    DISPLAY=:0.0 xhost + >> .xout.log 2>&1
  else
    echo "connecting to existing x server at :0.0"
  fi
  export DISPLAY=:0.0
else
  echo "already configured for x server at $DISPLAY"
fi
  4. Create .Xauthority file with proper read permissions 
    > touch .Xauthority
> chmod 644 .Xauthority
  5. Automatically log in dummy user on boot 
    > sudo systemctl edit getty@tty1

    Add the following and save

    [Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -a startup --noclear %I $TERM
  6. Reboot

After this, any other user can connect via SSH and run programs that depend on X. One note is that the DISPLAY variable is not automatically set, so users will have to either prepend commands with DISPLAY=:0.0 or export DISPLAY=:0.0.