I’m converting a CentOS 7 system to Lubuntu 20.04. It has 8 Nvidia 1080ti GPUs. I want to use the proprietary drivers from Canonical. That part works fine. But I also want to disable graphical mode. When I run systemctl isolate multi-user.target, I get a blank screen on the server’s VGA port. I expect to see a text login prompt.
I want to do this so all of the GPU’s memory is available for GPU computing. This system is not used for graphics – only CUDA programs.
Help?
$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release: 20.04
Codename: focal
So I don’t know how much this will help your particular need but it has been recommended before for folks who don’t want or need a desktop GUI to use Ubuntu server instead. While the name there can suggest that particular image is intended for servers only, Ubuntu server is basically the Ubuntu base with no GUI—basically. Since Lubuntu itself is based on Ubuntu, you shouldn’t see much of a difference for whatever you plan to use from a terminal-only perspective.
I don’t really know why changing the target resulted in that behavior but you can always try Ubuntu server. Since Lubuntu worked it should probably work just the same.
