question

You can of course use the blind install mechanism which is part of SetupHelper. You put the venus-data.tgz file on a flash drive and plug it into the GX device and reboot. The GUI should restart and you should see PackageManager at the bottom of the Settings menu. You can then download and install GuiMods from there.

Of course, that assumes you have a local or remote GUI.

PackageManager will detect package .tar.gz files on removable media and move them to /data. Check the SetupHelper ReadMe for details on this.

There are other mechanisms described which may help install packages in a headless environment.

Thanks for the pointers, I will try that and see.

I have a screen via VRM on the laptop so I don't think I'm headless but I haven't got a Colour Control.

An update:

I installed Bitvise instead of Putty and had the same problem except that the words printed all over the screen were "BitviseBitviseBitvise".

I tried again without the -q0 option in the wget line to download the file and it worked fine.

Soon after I had Guimods installed!

Next problem: I am working my way through the code instructions for installing an external relay and after restarting various services in venus as per the instructions and then rebooting the cerbo. It looked like a full reset happened as various things were back to factory settings. Package Manager is still in remote console/settings but it says it's not running and I can't see what to do to make it run.

More reboots have not helped.

Seems to have done another factory reset.

I will reinstall venus and reformat the usb stick and reload it.

I did all that and it's back on.

Sorry to keep bothering you with questions but I'm waiting for it to "initialise and restart". It's been a half-hour or so, should that take so long?