2019-01-08 15:48:25

Hello, has anyone here set up a raspberry pi out of the box, blind and with no sighted assisstance?

I am taking a university course on operating systems and I am given a raspberry pi, which I will need to set up and use. I think the easiest way tto make it accessible would be to have an ssh server running on it, to which I could connect to and use from my laptop running windows, but I am unsure how to get the pi to this point. I am given a network cable, but I don't have a router that I have admin access to.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

2019-01-08 23:28:03

Your best bet would be to do the following
1. Install Linux on your master PC, or if you don't have such possibility, virtualise it.
2. DOwnload a Rasbbian image or some other system you would like on your PI
3. Burn it on your SD card using DD
4. Mount your SD card in the linux system like so
mount /dev/mmcblk1 /mnt/sdcard
5. Chroot to your SD card with the following: sudo chroot /mnt/sdcard
6. This is the hardest point, you have to configure everything manually, because as far as I'm concerned you don't have access to the rasbbian installer itself. You would need to setup a network connection, and an ssh access. As far as I am concerned, sshd is installed in Rasbbian by default so that should not be a trouble.
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2019-01-09 03:48:09

I did a podcast a long time ago as to how to set up a Raspberry Pi. It was an old version of the Raspberry Pi, but it's still somewhat relevant. Unfortunately, the website where this podcast was hosted is no longer maintained. If you can find a copy of it, I'd say that's a good resource. Otherwise, you might want to check out the raspberryvi.org website.

2019-01-10 03:56:33

It's fairly easy to set one up, assuming you have access to a Linux computer and some Linux knowledge:

1. Burn a Raspbian image to your SD card.
2. Mount the boot partition of the SD card on a Linux computer, necessary because the card uses the EXT4 filesystem which is likely challenging to make work under Windows. I run GNOME-based environments everywhere, so this happens when I insert the SD card into a connected reader.
3. cd into the directory where the boot partition is mounted. This is the directory containing config.txt.
4. Run "touch ssh". This creates an empty file named "ssh". When Raspbian finds /boot/ssh, it automatically enables the SSH server.
5. If you need wifi, place a wpa_supplicant.conf file in this same directory. I won't explain how to configure this because it's documented exhaustively elsewhere. If you're going through ethernet, I think it's sufficient to plug it into a network with a DHCP server. With the wpa_supplicant.conf in place and configured for your network, the Pi should automatically associate on boot.
6. Run "sync" to ensure that the filesystem buffers are synced to the card, then safely eject it.

Now, with the card in your Pi and the Pi powered, you can ssh to pi@raspberrypi and do the rest of the setup. I realize it isn't quite as easy as plugging in a monitor and keyboard, but it's fairly straight-forward once you've done it a few times. I have one Pi acting as my router, another running Home Assistant, and a third kicking around somewhere for another project. I have a boot/ directory containing the empty ssh file, along with a pre-configured wpa_supplicant.conf file and a config.txt with the settings needed for my HDMI receiver. I basically burn the card, copy the files, and I'm ready to boot and configure. And if one of these systems fails, or if I decide to rebuild it, I can usually flash it with confidence that it will at least come up on my network and be accessible with a default password, even if it doesn't do what I intended.

2019-01-30 15:26:34

Thank you all for the advice.

The way I had things set up is I had a sd card with noobs burned onto it, so I just popped it into my windows 10 machine, found the boot partition no problem and created the empty ssh file using cmd.

Then putting the sd card back into the pi, I proceeded to plug in the pi power into my laptop  and connected the two computers using a ethernet cable.

I let the pi boot and do it's thang for a while. Then I tried :
ssh pi@raspberry
but that didn
t work. So, I used nmap tool to check for devices networked via ethernet to my laptop and of course there was onlyu one other device in the network, the pi. so I took that ip address and used it in lieu of the hostname and ssh worked no problem.

I turned on internet sharing on in my windows laptop and the pi connects to the internet just fine.

I am using the pi for a class on operating systems and don't need the pi to interact with any other computers, so this set up works great for me.

2019-01-30 16:48:58

Cool, glad it worked. You may also be able to use raspberrypi.local instead of raspberrypi or an IP address. The .local suffix sometimes makes the domain resolution work. The suffix isn't always .local, but more often than not it is.

2019-01-30 19:12:28

Or if this doesn't work you can install Samba on your Pi, so it will be visible to the windows machines.

2019-01-31 01:36:51

Oh, this topic is a helpful one to me! I can now try to unbox and setup my pi which is lying on one of the shelves in my room for about 2 years!

I don't speak as good as I write, and I don't listen as good as I speak.