I’ve tried both Debian and ubuntu images. Normally I’d expect a CLI to come up when I plug them into the monitor, but I don’t get that here. I can’t set them up via SSH for my Wi-Fi otherwise since I don’t have access to an ethernet port to use.
What kind of display do you have? Do you have the brand and model number?
In my limited experience, I’ve found it’ll only output video if I had it plugged in when the system booted.
This is almost universal for headless systems. Linux console size is determine at boot and doesn’t change dynamically after that. Only GUIs listen for video connector events and trigger a sequence of events to adjust for the new output display.