Can’t view BIOS on Dell 1050 micro
Summary: Tinypilot does not display any output until the Linux kernel loading screen shows up (not even GRUB). The output + peripherals work fine after that.
There have been several posts reporting the same problem but the common comment has been that the problem is only with laptops because some laptops don’t produce output on external monitor until the OS boots. This is a mini PC - it does not have a screen by definition and expects an external display device to be connected. It works fine on my various monitor that run at 1080p, 2K and 4K natively.
As you can probably guess, not having access to the BIOS kind of defeats the purpose of this $400 device… I can always use SSH, VNC or RDP once the OS loads.
Michael Lynch @michael2022-03-03 15:55:53.659ZThanks for reporting this. I have a Dell OptiPlex 7040, and I've seen this as well.
Can you try pressing F12 (repeatedly) in your TinyPilot web dashboard while your Dell system is booting? That should bring up the boot screen and let you access BIOS through the TinyPilot.
The Dell OptiPlex 7040 for some reason outputs a black screen to TinyPilot before you push a key.
If that doesn't work, you could also try upgrading the BIOS. I'm seeing it work on BIOS Revision 1.20.2, but your system might be using a different BIOS versioning.