I might be projecting, but I believe a large portion of Raspberry Pi’s out there will be currently sitting in their owner’s drawers, not doing much at all since the hype around the device has settled down. I thought it would be a great little thing to use as a server for domotics, local websites and what not, so why not put it in a dark little corner and run it headless? And while we are at it, why not have a remote desktop?

Whilst linux allows us unlimited control using just a simple SSH, its sometimes nice to have a remote desktop just to manage files and directories, and for the rare occasions we might get lost in the terminal. First thing is first, and after looking at the possible solutions, I chose to go with TeamViewer for the remote desktop. Alternatives would have been any of the VNC flavours, which are particularly attractive in the face of the hacking, and subsequent mishandling of the situation, which TeamViewer suffered last year. Nonetheless, Teamviewer’s ease of setup for remote access from the internet and my general use with it day to day, makes it win here since I’m not too fussed about security at the moment. I hope they are a little more careful now ! Using VNC is just a little more complicated but you can find out how to set it up here.

Requirements:

Hardware

1. Raspberry Pi (I used a RPi 3 Model B for this).
2. SD card (16gb more than enough space, but higher access speeds are always appeciated in a boot SD card).
3. Power cable and Ethernet cable for the RPi.
4. A normal desktop/laptop, running your usual OS.

Software

1. USB boot drive creator, I use Rufus in windows.
2. Telnet/ssh application, such as PuTTY or KiTTY.
3. Teamviewer already installed in your desktop/laptop.

Steps

Step 1: Create the boot SD card

Download the latest image from the Raspberry Pi website, making sure to select the ‘Rasbian with desktop’. Then use your usual boot drive creator as usual to load the image on to the SD card and make it bootable. I personally love Rufus due to its simplicity, portability and speed; alternatives can be UNetbootin and Universal USB Installer.

Rufus in Action

Step 2: Make sure SSH will run on startup

The main reason to even explain such simple first steps is to not forget this vital part. The RPi by default will not have SSH running, and we require SSH to be able to access the RPi terminal without using a monitor/keyboard/mouse plugged in. To activate SSH, navigate to your freshly made SD card and place an empty file in the root folder (that’s D: in my case), named ssh. The easiest way to do this, in windows anyways, is to make a text file and change the name, making sure to delete the .txtat the end. If you can’t access the file extension, just go to ‘view’ in the top bar and make sure ‘show known extensions’ is ticked.

Step 3:

Now just plug in the SD card, power and Ethernet cables and watch the lights blink!

Step 4:

Now that the RPi is connected, we need to connect to it through SSH. To do this first we need to find the IP address, and surprisingly, the easiest way is probably to access your router. In my case the virgin media hub shows you pretty clearly which is your router:

Knowing that, we open up PuTTY or KiTTY and fill in the IP we just found. Leaving the rest of the settings

When prompted use the default login details for Raspberry Pi’s

username: pi

password: raspberry

With that you should have access to the RPi! :happy:

Step 4:

Run the RPi’s inbuilt configurator with sudo raspi-config, then use option 1 to change pi’s password. Even if not directly exposed to the outside internet, keeping the default password is a recipe for disaster.

The raspi-config

Step 5:

Still in the raspi-config, run 8 Update the upgrade option to make sure the whole distro is up to date. This is similar to using sudo apt-get dist-upgrade from the command line.

Step 6:

Then under 7 Advanced Options, select A1 Expand Filesystem. This will make sure you use up all the space available in the SD card, and not just the 4gb or so that the original boot image had.

Step 7:

A kind of mystery step needed here is to set the screen to a large size before going forward. This might have an effect on how it is displayed on physical screens when you have them plugged in so keep it in mind that you might want to revert it in the future. In 7 Advanced Options again, go to A5 Resolution and select the largest size you’d like to fit in your client’s monitors, for me it was 1080p as my screen is larger and I wanted to make the most of the realestate, but the choice is up to you. Then exit the config and let it restart.

Step 8:

Hopefully your SSH client will resync after the reboot, if not, just open up the SSH channel like before. Now we download the teamviewer package for Arm devices, which the RPi is, using a direct download from the website:

wget -P /home/pi/Downloads https://download.teamviewer.com/download/linux/teamviewer-host_armhf.deb

and then use the apt to install the package as such:

sudo apt install /home/pi/Downloads/teamviewer-host_armhf.deb

Step 9:

Whilst teamviewer is installed, it still won’t run if you simply type teamviewer, as it will rely on the x server to show a GUI and will fail when it realises there’s no graphical display.

It don’t work

Initially one could use sudo teamviewer setup, log in with your credentials and it would work, however this seems to be bugged in the recent releases; thus, you need to add the computer manually with the id+password workaround. To do this, first find out the teamviewer ID from the installation using:

teamviewer info

Make a note of it. Then set a desired password with:

sudo teamviewer passwd YOUR_PASSWORD

Details and set password

Now in your desktop/laptop, add a remote computer, and use the ‘Add remote computer’ and fill in the prior details.

Back in TeamViewer fill in the details

Step 10:

Now if all went well, you can open up the remote desktop from your teamviewer client!

Et Voila

If you see the screen in an absolutely diminutive size then you messed up in Step 7. Go back and try raspi-config again.

Tiny screen problem!

Optional Step 11:

Since we used the ID and password method to setup the remote access, some options such as wake-on-lan won’t be available to use until you have fully assigned the RPi to your teamviewer account. To do this simply use the remote desktop to open the teamviewer options inside the RPi and add your details under ‘Account Assignment’ in the General Settings.

Get all the features

Note:

Setting up the Raspberry Pi to use WiFi off the bat, whilst headless, is a little more involved, as you need to specifically change the Raspberry Pi’s wpa_supplicant.conf before installing the SD card. An example of this is can be found here. I didn’t need to do this as the device is going to reside next to the router and ethernet was simply easier for me.

Credits

• Setting up SSH by James Mackenzie
• ID + Password Method by Digicrat