I 'Resolved' it by commenting out indi_rpicam from the cmake file to let it finish

That is certainly a good solution especially if you don’t need that driver. I think we should bring it up as an issue for the person who wrote that driver though

Hello,
Back to my remark about missing /boot/config.txt, I found here that.
Nice. That answears the question I was asking me about what would happen if I created such a file.
OK, maybe was it obvious for many here, but... newbie with RPI, newbie with INDI/Kstars/etc., and... what else ?

No, I don't think that is obvious at all. I do remember that is true of a number of the config files in Linux, and as I recall, in some of my scripts I have made those files if they don't exist, but no, to a beginner, I think this is very useful info. Also to those of us who have been tinkering for a bit, it is a good reminder too.

Hello,
I thought I had found the graal, but alas not.
Creating the file into the /boot/ directory did nothing at all. I digged deeper, and found that in fact it lies into /boot/firmware.
Before finding your project, I had been struggling with two other ones that I abandonned due to too much hassle setting them.
One of them I still have the card, and as I inserted it in my linux box I could access the /boot/ and found the config.txt file there.
This has been built on a RPI3 with an old distro whereas astroPi3 has been built on a RPI4 with the most recent distro.
So, things must have evolved and some files must have moved to new locations due to some improvement.
However, though I added the following lines to the file, it did not change anything :
<code>hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=82</code>
My intent was to get a 1920x1080 display with vnc access with no monitor attached.
I could find as well that, though there is no config.txt into the /boot folder, it contains two config files nammed respectively config-5.15.0-1029-raspi and config-5.15.0-1030-raspi, that contain many information.
I am still digging, and will report if I find something useful.
Rgrds,

Yes that is one annoying thing. The various distributions typically want a monitor to be attached to set the resolution, but of course we don’t want one to be attached. We want it to be headless and access it via VNC. Often they will have a default resolution but it is often too small of a resolution to be useful. I think the more recent Ubuntu variants have finally switched from 640x480 to 1024 × 768 which is better but it would be nice to be able to choose. We also want to be able to plug in an hdmi display in an emergency but a bunch of distributions will disable it if no monitor is detected which then leaves you no way to connect if VNC fails. There are ways to get around these issues including the one I put in that you are discussing, but they are not standardized across SBCs nor are they guaranteed to work in the future.

The annoying thing is that these are pretty important functions or settings for a computer you plan to make headless and still access via VNC. It would be nice if there were a standard way to set these parameters that will always work.

Hi Rob, i dont know if this will help, but this is what i did on my build and it seems to work ok

I have tried video dummy as a solution on a number of different systems. It does work well to allow you to get a good resolution on your VNC view. Unfortunately when you bring in a real monitor or hdmi tv, generally it won’t work properly if you are using video dummy.

agreed.

You just have to remember to rename that xorg.conf file so it doesn't take effect when you want a monitor or use a mini HDMI dongle instead to trick it

The other solution with the conf file is much more elegant since it is hot pluggable with monitors.

I just wish that would work with all sbcs

i do remember doing something similar with my asus tinkerboard and it worked ok. but i no longer have that SBC.

Yes its not easy. Many a night tearing out my hair to figure that one out