This seems more like hardware than installation, so I hope this is an acceptable spot!

In short: can I take the video card out of my headless backend box and expect it to work? Specifically, will I still be able to VNC into it? Any nasty surprises like suddenly I can't ssh in or anything like that? Yeah, I know I can experiment with it; just thought maybe someone had beaten me to the punch.

Second part: I see that the latest version supports VNC directly! So if I were to upgrade now and in the future, can I leave out the video card and do the complete install either via VNC or remote shell? Yeah, I'll have to connect a keyboard to boot past LILO, but other than that?

I just realized that my useless video card costs me $25 per year in electricity while sitting idle! There's no on-board video, otherwise it'd be a non-issue. Also, even more importantly, I'd love to get rid of my crappy, legacy CRT monitors, which means getting rid of all of my external monitors. Both of the iMacs are fully integrated, and I just hate to keep these behemoths around.

Most BIOSes require a video card to be present to boot. There is supposedly a way to get the console output to redirect to a serial port, but unfortunately most BIOSes do not have that capability.
If you are worried about power consumption, it might be worthwile downgrading your video card.
The current VNC setup for 5E50 just echos the current graphic screen, so you would need X running at the console. You would need to reconfigure the VNC setup to create a remote graphical session.

Bruce S.

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Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1

If you can get around booting without a video card, then you could always forward X when you need to configure something w/ a gui. I do that for mythtv-setup from time to time. On a machine with an ssh client, just type The -X enables X11 forwarding, and the -C enables compression, which should help a little. Then once logged in just type whatever command you need to get displayed on your local machine, for example: You could use Putty from a Windows machine as well, there's a checkbox to enable X11 forwarding.

More than anything, though, I was hoping to get rid of the dang CRT monitors. I only keep them around now for doing new installs… although I rebooted yesterday from a PuTTY session, and now my server's dead -- it looks like it didn't boot back up for some reason (and I'm offsite). Maybe I'll look for a crappy, cheap, tiny LCD monitor after all. At least it won't take up any space.

Thanks, guys.