Over the festive season, I was fortunate enough to acquire a Raspberry PI. I have never had the opportunity to play with one of these, I had to do a bit of research into what I needed to do to get this up and running.
To get all the software I needed I went to the following website where you can download all the required “NOOBS” (New Out Of the Box Software) you require.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
Once the operation system had been installed I needed to work out how to get access to the PI remotely. The following are the steps I took in order to make this work.
1, Enabling the GUI
Assuming that you are using Raspbian, it is actually rather simple to do this. Simply open the terminal, and type in the following:
sudo raspi-config
The following window should show up
Navigate to
boot_behaviour and click enter. This should make it so that the GUI interface start automatically.2, Configuring a static IP address
A. Checking Set Up
Boot into Raspian and log in (Username. pi, Password. raspberry), this will all be command line stuff, so no need to log in to the GUI.
First, we need to list the network interface we currently have available:
cat /etc/network/interfaces
The line . . . .
iface eth0 inet dhcp
Implies that we’re currently getting out IP address via DHCP, meaning it’s being dynamically registered by the router. This is what we want to change!
B. Gathering Information
Fist of all we need to grab some information from our router and Pi. There’s a couple of command we need to run to get this info. Have a pen and paper handy! . . .
ifconfig
This reveals your router information, the bit you want is after eth0 (the ethernet connection). . . .
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:27:eb:b3:fc:2c
inet addr:192.168.1.81 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
Write down the following information. . .
inet addr – 192.168.1.81 (Pi’s Current IP Address)
Bcast – 192.168.1.255 (The Broadcast IP Range)
Mask – 255.255.255.0 (Subnet Mask Address)
We need a little more information before we proceed. Use the command. . .
netstat -nr
(route -n will give you the same info.)
We need:
‘Gateway‘ Address – 192.168.1.254
‘Destination‘ Address – 192.168.1.0
C. Editing Network Configuration
We now need to plug this information into the Pi’s network configuration file using a text editor. I always use nano text editor. . .
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
Simply change the line that reads:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
to
iface eth0 inet static
Then directly below this line enter the following
address 192.168.1.81
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.254
To clarify what each part means. . . .
address – The address you want to give your Pi, this can be any IP in the network range, but it’s usually advisable to go higher rather than lower, or you could end up logging different devices to the same IP! I’ve selected 192.168.1.81, as we’re already registered to that address (denoted by ‘inet addr‘), but this can be any IP address from the range192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.255.
netmask – The ‘Mask‘ address we wrote down earlier.
network – The router IP address, this is the ‘Destination‘ Address was found earlier. You can also grab this off your router, it will say on the side somewhere.
broadcast – The ‘Bcast‘ address we wrote down earlier.
gateway – This is the ‘Gateway‘ address we found earlier.
So, it should look something like the above, but with your values! Remember to save before exit, CTRL+X (exit) then yes to save changes!
D. Re-check Static IP Configuration
Then we’ll need to reboot and check your changes. . .
sudo reboot
Log back in and run
ifconfig
Which should reveal your new settings. .
To double checks all is working as it should, ping your ‘Gateway‘ Address. . .
ping 192.168.1.254 -c 10
(the -c 10 command simply denotes that you want to ping it 10 times, if you forget to add this, it will ping the address continuosly. To stop it press CTRL+C)
This should ping successfully and all packets should be received. If something’s not right double check through all your IP addresses, and make sure you’re pinging the right address too. Remember you can always revert back to DHCP by reversing the steps.
3, Installing PI Software
First you will need to install XRDP server on the Raspberry Pi:
sudo apt-get install xrdp
Once installed reboot your Raspberry Pi. The xrdp process will auto load and start when you boot the Raspberry Pi.
As with SSH, If you want to fiddle (not recommended), you can start and stop different services with the /etc/init.d files. There are a number of commands, start, stop, restart etc. To obtain a list, type:
/etc/init.d/xrdp
For example, to check the current status of ssh:
/etc/init.d/xrdp status
We can currently see that the xrdp service is running, however I’m disconnected.
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