Poor man’s guide to Raspberry Pi initial installation

Install Raspberry Pi without a monitor

Note: this post was from December 2015

As a security consultant, I travel around quite often. It becomes difficult for me to gain access to a HDMI cable, it is also extra weight to carry should I choose to buy one. Another requirement of installation in most guides for the Raspberry Pi 2 is a monitor of some sort. However, as we all know, a monitor is just a visual display. Other guides also require the use of a router.

In this guide, I explain how I use the following resources to get my Raspberry Pi set up:

• Raspberry Pi 2

• Ethernet Cable

• SD Card + Adapter

• Micro USB to USB cable.

• Laptop with SD Card Adapter slot

Firstly visit the Raspberry Pi website and download Raspbian via the following link:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

This gives us a zip file. To obtain the img file that we will be requiring in the rest of this guide, simply extract it.

Place the SD Card into the adapter and attach it to your laptop. After doing so, launch SDFormatter and select the SD Card volume label then click format. This is displayed in the following image.

Once the SD Card is formatted and ready for use, we can make use of Win32 Disk Imagerto transfer the image to the disk. Open up Win32 Disk Imager, select the SD Card, select the img file and click write. Displayed below.

After the writing process has finished, we need to assign a static IP for the device. Open the cmdline.txt file on the SD Card and append “ip=169.254.176.130″. I have chosen 169.254.176.130 because it was not being used so I would not have collisions.

Now attach one end of the Ethernet cable to your laptop and the other end to your Raspberry Pi 2. After some time, your laptop should be assigned an IP address. I was assigned 169.254.176.129. We can check this by typing “ipconfig” on Windows in the command line.

Now we can check for connectivity and whether the Raspberry Pi 2 assigned the IP correctly by pinging it. Below shows this being performed.

Now we can SSH into Raspberry Pi 2 using Putty. We can login using the default credentials of username: pi, password: raspberry.

By typing in “sudo raspi-config”, we are displayed the Raspberry Pi Configuration Tool. We can navigate this using the arrow keys. I will not go into the different configurations here as it is self explanatory.

This quick guide will end here as I would transfer this onto a router network to continue installation of other software I want to use such as Kodi or VNC using apt-get.