I bought a cheap motherboard and realized that, I have no cable for 10pin(motherboard) to 15pin vga. And things went worse after I realized that my USB2TTL cable is not working for RS232 serial port.
Then... I have to install archlinux WITHOUT monitor. But, fortunately, I have a KEYBOARD!
I was too lazy to modify ArchISO. I just plug the ARCHISO usb stick and a blank harddisk, and boot, then a new client appears on my router. The dhcpcd is working out-of-box!
The router told me the IP: 192.168.1.7
Then I type the following characters on my keyboard:
curl https://recolic.org/setup/ | bash
systemctl start sshd
recolic.org is my self-hosted website, and I can access the nginx access.log to confirm that the command
above has succeeded. The setup script will download my public key, and put it into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys,
and configure the permission bits to make sshd happy.
Now try ssh root@192.168.1.7. It works.
It's too simple to install an arch linux. archfi made it easy.
AFter shutdown the machine, remove the harddisk from motherboard, and use another WORKING linux laptop to mount this harddisk. Do the following things:
mount BOOT partition and ROOT partition to /mnt
arch-chroot into it
install openssh, dhcpcd
systemctl enable sshd, dhcpcd
Modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow RootLogin.
Set root password if you're not already done.
put your public key into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and set the permission properly.
done
Good. Plug the harddisk into the headless machine, it should boot and be ready for ssh-into.