Headless Raspbian Installation
Here are the steps I took to get Raspbian working on my Raspberry Pi in a headless fashion. The Rasbian SD card image has just been released and can be downloaded here.
Following the instructions here:
$ unzip 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.zip Archive: 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.zip inflating: 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.img $ df -h $ diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1 Volume RASPI on disk2s1 unmounted $ sudo dd bs=1m if=2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk2 1850+0 records in 1850+0 records out 1939865600 bytes transferred in 198.319278 secs (9781528 bytes/sec) $ diskutil eject /dev/rdisk2 Disk /dev/rdisk2 ejected |
I had to make one change to the instructions as there was an error: replacing “bs=1M” with “bs=1m” due to using a differing version of dd.
Plug that memory card into the raspi and wait a minute, then find the IP (I did this via my router, but could potentially use ping 192.168.0.255 and see if it responds, or sudo nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24 which is a better solution).
And we have a result!
$ ssh pi@192.168.0.10 pi@192.168.0.10's password: Linux raspberrypi 3.1.9+ #168 PREEMPT Sat Jul 14 18:56:31 BST 2012 armv6l The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Type 'startx' to launch a graphical session NOTICE: the software on this Raspberry Pi has not been fully configured. Please run 'sudo raspi-config' pi@raspberrypi ~ $ |
Run raspi-config to change/update the timezone and memory split (less needed for the GUI if running headless), and to also update any packages. Then reboot to get those changes to take effect:
sudo reboot |
The next thing is to change to the Raspi to a static IP so you can find it any time it restarts or your network connection is dropped. Follow the instructions here. I only altered the interfaces file to
#iface eth0 inet dhcp address 192.168.0.14 gateway 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 |
Another reboot to make sure that change takes effect (you could just restart the networking but that failed for me last time meaning I had to plug it in to a monitor to work out what had gone wrong…):
sudo reboot |
Next, copy over your public key and, as this is fresh install, make .ssh and authorized_keys.
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ mkdir .ssh pi@raspberrypi ~ $ mv id_rsa.pub .ssh/authorized_keys |
Finally, start adding in some packages that make life easier using sudo apt-get: screen, emacs, gfortran etc.
Took me two tries but I got raspbian installed headlessly and can login and look around. I may not need to setup the static address you describe, but probably will do so, but first I need to know if I need to add any software in order to plug a 1TB drive to be used for backup into a USB port.
Good point on the static address – I don’t use static currently as I install avahi to make the pi reachable on a .local address using the hostname.
You shouldn’t need to add any software when connecting a drive, as long as it is appropriately formatted…