After half term, I’ll be giving our Programming Club members access to their own Raspberry Pi. But because I don’t have the space for extra monitors in our IT Lab, I’ll need to have another workaround for letting the students have access to their Pis.
The best way to do this is to make the Pis ‘headless’. No need for anything other than power and an Ethernet cable.
I’ve done this by cobbling together instructions I found across other websites – my build notes are below. Each Pi has its own dedicated IP address that’s outside of our DHCP scope.
Image the SD card
Begin by using Mac to install image to SD card by opening Terminal and running the following command to get the SD card id:
df -h
Unmount it to prepare it for imaging
sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk5s1
(disk5s1 is the value returned for my SD card. YMMV.)
Change your working directory to that of where you have your Raspberry Pi OS image. In this case, I have an image of raspberian-wheezy in my ~/Downloads folder. Copy image. Wait.
cd ~/Downloads
sudo dd bs=1m if=2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk5
Once that’s all complete, your SD card will mount itself in the Finder with a name of ‘Untitled’. Eject it, put it in your Pi and start it up.
Run raspi-config
raspi-config should launch once your Pi has completed the boot sequence. I chose the options to:
- expand rootfs, which will partition the rest of your SD card to be available to be used upon the next reboot
- enable ssh – essential if you want to remote in to your Pi
- check for any updates
Then finish. There is no immediate need to reboot your Pi at this point, as re-partitioning the available SD card space takes about a minute per available gigabyte.
Configure the Network
Open up your *interfaces* file
sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces
Configure your network interface. Each one of our Pis has been given a static address.
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.x
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
You can verify your network changes after the next reboot.
Install and Configure tightvncserver
(more instructions here)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
Start server and configure a password (password is restricted to 8 characters). A view-only password is really not needed.
/usr/bin/tightvncserver
Download this text file to add tightvnc to startup
wget http://www.penguintutor.com/otherfiles/tightvncserver-init.txt
Move it to the correct location
sudo mv tightvncserver-init.txt /etc/init.d/tightvncserver
Change the file so it is owned by root (not strictly neccessary, but is the standard ownership for init files
sudo chown root:root /etc/init.d/tightvncserver
Make the file executable
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tightvncserver
Add the script to the default runlevels with the command
sudo update-rc.d tightvncserver defaults
If all has gone correctly at this point, you can reboot your Pi. When it comes back up it will begin to reallocate free space on the SD card if you chose that option in *raspi-config*. Again, allow about 1 minute per Gb on the card.
sudo shutdown -r now
Check everything works
When your Pi comes back up, check that VNC works on port 5901. You can do this on a Mac by using Screen Sharing in the Finder by choosing Go > Connect to Server and then typing vnc://pi@192.168.1.x:5901, using your Pi’s IP address.
You can also check SSH from Terminal:
ssh pi@192.168.x.x
If it works, that’s it, you’re done! Shut down the Pi and relocate it somewhere else with just a power lead and network cable.
sudo halt