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Amal Satheesan
Amal Satheesan

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Setting Raspberry Pi with Laptop

Requirements

  1. Raspberry Pi (all models)
  2. Memory card (16GB or larger recommended)
  3. SD Card adapter
  4. LAN cable
  5. Power adapter

Disclaimer:

You can use any operating system of your choice. I'll be demonstrating with Arch Linux, but the steps are applicable across different OSes.

Installing the Operating System

Start by downloading your preferred Raspberry Pi operating system here. If you prefer another ARM-based OS, feel free to download it instead.

Flashing the OS

To flash the OS onto your SD card, download Raspberry Pi Imager from here or from their GitHub repository for other systems.

  1. Connect the SD card to your computer.
  2. Open Raspberry Pi Imager.
  3. Select your device.
  4. Choose the downloaded OS.
  5. Select the SD card as the storage location.
  6. Configure hostname, username, and password.
  7. Enable SSH.
  8. Write the image to the SD card.

My setup:

I already downloaded the OS to local system. Also using a raspberry pi 4 Model B having 4 GB of RAM. My settings will be this:

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Also, you need to make sure you are remembering the settings in this page:

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Setting Up Remote Access

After flashing:

  • Create an empty file named ssh (without an extension) in the bootfs directory of the SD card.
  • Eject the SD card and insert it into your Raspberry Pi.
  • Power on the Raspberry Pi.

Enabling VNC

Open a terminal or cmd. Type

ssh <username>@<localhost-name>.local
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Type yes and enter the password you set during setup. You will be logged into the terminal and you are good to go.

Get the IP address of the Raspberry Pi:

ip a
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Remember the local IP address of the device connected to the device (This only works when the pi and your device are both connected to the same network).

To enable VNC for graphical access:

sudo raspi-config
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Navigate to:

  1. Display options: Set a resolution.
  2. Interface options: Enable VNC.

Access pi by typing ip address into your VNC top bar for connection.

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Stay tuned for more exciting projects and tutorials in my Raspberry Pi series! Happy tinkering!

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