Doing things from the virtual terminal on the X screen

I think I may have figured out how to do things from the virtual terminals to affect the X screen.

The vt for X is 6 so we can do:

chvt 6 to switch to the virtual terminal 6

Next we need to have a little delay, so let's add sleep 4 (you can also use 2 if you think that's a bit faster)

We also need to add "export DISPLAY=:0" to set the X display.

Then to change the user, we use "sudo -u knoppix "

So to do xrandr and change the resolution: (this is pretty useful when you mess around with screen resolutions that cause a blank screen)

Hit CTRL+ALT+F4 to switch to VT 4: then type


chvt 6; sleep 4; export DISPLAY=:0; sudo -u knoppix xrandr

chvt 6; sleep 4; export DISPLAY=:0; sudo -u knoppix xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode 800x600


To launch terminator:

chvt 6; sleep 4; export DISPLAY=:0; sudo -u knoppix terminator &


To open the main menu:

chvt 6; sleep 4; export DISPLAY=:0; sudo -u knoppix lxpanelctl menu