Greetings,
I have a balenafin and installed balenaOS on it. I connected my screen via HDMI. It boots but after booting, it stays at the main screen where there is a big Balena logo in the middle and can’t do anything. How can I open a command line or terminal from this stage?
My goal is to run a terminal emulator for pinging a device just to check if the serial connection is correct.
Thank you for your time
Alian
Hi there! May I recommend ssh-ing to the HostOS from balena device dashboard, for accessing a terminal on that device?
Also. as far as I can tell, you plan to use that setup for local development. In that case I can recommend flashing a dev variant of balenaOS (which comes with a terminal access instead of a splash screen), so you may use the terminal with a screen and keyboard. More info on dev OS images: https://www.balena.io/docs/reference/OS/overview/2.x/#dev-vs-prod-images
@mikesimos thank you for your answer. Is there a guide on how to “ssh-ing on the HostOS”?
Also I tried the dev variant of balenaOS and it gives me the terminal access ! however, it is asking for a “login” and a “password” which I couldn’t find. Would you know by any chance?
Hello Alian,
Glad to hear that you now have a terminal on your monitor, ready to login to. Because you are using a Development image, the username you need to input is ‘root’, and there is no password set for that user account. Obviously, this is not a secure system, but it is helpful for development and testing things quickly. The image that you flashed the first time is known as a “Production” image, and in that case, the terminal is disabled for security purposes (as you found out).
In order to reach a system via SSH, you need to know the IP Address of the balena device, and, an SSH client application (or via the command line). There is some quality documentation here that explains the process depending upon your operating system: https://www.howtogeek.com/311287/how-to-connect-to-an-ssh-server-from-windows-macos-or-linux/
Hope that helps!
It would be helpful to know how to activate the terminal from the splash screen in the case of network issues and debugging the network profiles (which is what brought me here). Any keystrokes we can use to activate this?
Hi @arbitraryy – I don’t believe there is a way to do this, but I’m asking our team to double-check and we’ll get back to you.
All the best,
Hugh
Hi there,
we confirm that there is no way to open a terminal on a monitor/keyboard on a production release, apart from an ssh session if keys has been added to config.json.
see: https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/blob/66f936ed7466f8906116e2224f562deff587260f/meta-balena-common/conf/distro/include/balena-os.inc#L59