(Sorry for the incredibly noob question. I’m trying to figure what is possible before buying some parts, which is why I’m asking instead of just trying it out myself.)
I am planning to make a server out of a few old PC parts. I’ll mostly be using it for two purposes:
(1) Serving media, cloud storage and a few other services to my devices.
(2) As a media center for a home cinema setup.
Of course, since (1) implies it will be running 24/7, I’m trying to be mindful about power consumption. One of the ways I’ve planned to do that is by keeping the setup headless until I actually want to use it as in (2), when I’d like to be able to launch a graphical session (for the sake of the argument, let’s say in Ubuntu).
Now my question is: is there any way to launch an X session (again, simplicity, let’s say I plug in a keyboard and type a command) and exit it without needing to restart the server? For example, if someone else is using the server to watch something in their own laptop, I wouldn’t want to restart the server just to watch something in the home cinema.
My intuition tells me that simply running startx should not kill the existent session, is this correct?
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Why don’t you just use plex for 2? Then keep the server always headless and the power consumption will be minimal?
I don’t think I understand what you mean by plex for 2.
Plex or Jellyfin can act as your media server and stream direct to your TV. No need to have a graphical interface running on the server at all. Also has the benefit of being able to access the content anywhere.
Yes, I know this, but this not relevant to my question. I don’t have a TV, the server is the playing device.
I am not sure about your exact question but will mention that gracefully shutting down and powering up the server may be difficult and time consuming.
