Yeah ok, that makes more sense. Some starting points (arch user by practice, but Mint will have similar interfaces):
- use DPMS to turn screens on and off dynamically. This would be to put a monitor to sleep.
- I would think there is a kernel parameter to either disable a display output or the driver used by the laptop display.
- I believe “agetty” is the program that gives you a terminal on a display. Thile general term for what you are interacting with is a getty. You can see an example of setting up a generic automatic login in section 2.3.1 of that link.
- The easy way out to run a command on start is to run bash, then have the command in the bottom of your .bashrc file.
- the slightly better way to do this is to create a new user that will be just for this purpose (like a service account).
- the better way would be to run the command straight through the terminal, instead of starting a shell in interactive mode. This would be replacing
${TERM}with something like/bin/sh -c '/bin/htop'. - I’m not sure how you could get a specific tty on a specific monitor, but I would expect there is a way to do it through the kernel parameters. This probably isn’t needed as you don’t plan on having another screen anyway. You could just use tty1 and be done with it.
- the other thing you may want to do is to set “quiet” mode in the kernel parameters, as the system may print status messages onto the tty be default.
Well done! That looks amazing!
I’m not too sure about the overs can issue, I would have thought the options you found were the right ones.
Another option for display along the same lines might be btop. People like to get fancy with status monitors. Either way, I think yours is looking great.