You don’t want to connect a monitor and keyboard to setup and run a headless Raspberry Pi? It needs only a few simple steps, to get a fully headless setup of Raspbian OS Bookworm on your Raspberry Pi.
My tutorial was executed on Fedora Desktop.
First, write the downloaded raspbian image to the SD-Card
Be careful, to write the image to the right device!
xz -d 2023-10-10-raspios-bookworm-armhf-lite.img.xz sudo dd if=2023-10-10-raspios-bookworm-armhf-lite.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M
Reinsert the SD-Card and create / add some configuration files
Create a WLAN Configuration File
With this config, your Raspi can autoconnect to your home wifi on first boot. This is necessary to connect via ssh.
Before Raspbian Bullseye:
With older versions of Raspbian OS wpa_supplicant is used to configure the wifi connection.
You need a wpa_supplicant template file with your WiFi Settings.
vi wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=DE
network={
ssid="YOURSSID"
psk="YOURPASSWORD"
scan_ssid=1
}
Copy the earlier created WLAN config file:
cp wpa_supplicant.conf /run/media/juergen/bootfs
Raspbian OS Bullseye or newer versions:
Rasbian OS now uses NetworkManager to manage wifi connections. You can use the following template to create an nmconnection-file.
cat <<your_ssid>>.nmconnection [connection] id=<<your_ssid>> type=wifi interface-name=wlan0 [wifi] mode=infrastructure ssid=<<your_ssid>> [wifi-security] auth-alg=open key-mgmt=wpa-psk psk=<<your_wlan_password>> [ipv4] method=auto [ipv6] addr-gen-mode=default method=auto [proxy]
Copy the nmconnection file with sudo to the sd-card rootfs:
sudo cp <<your_ssid>>.nmconnection /run/media/juergen/rootfs/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections
Additional configs
Create an empty file called ‘ssh’ on the boot partition to enable ssh daemon:
touch /run/media/juergen/bootfs/ssh
Change the hostname:
sudo sed -i 's/raspberrypi/<<your_hostname>>/g' /run/media/juergen/rootfs/etc/hosts sudo sed -i 's/raspberrypi/<<your_hostname>>/g' /run/media/juergen/rootfs/etc/hostname
Since Raspbian (Debian) Bullseye there is no default user on the system, so we have to create our own. Openssl encrypts the clear text password with SHA512
echo -n juergen: > /run/media/juergen/bootfs/userconf echo "your_password_in_clear_text" | openssl passwd -6 -stdin >> /run/media/juergen/bootfs/userconf
Unmount the SD-Card partitions:
sudo umount /run/media/juergen/bootfs sudo umount /run/media/juergen/rootfs
Now insert SD-Card in Raspberry Pi and boot. Then you can ping the Pi and login with SSH:
If the screen gets black during boot process, then you must disable display auto configuration in config.txt
sed -i 's/dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d/#dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d/g' /run/media/juergen/bootfs/config.txt
First time boot of the new installed Raspberry Pi
Please keep in mind, that the first boot takes longer because of resizing partition and ssh key creation.
ping yourhostname ssh juergen@yourhostname
Login to your new installed Raspberry Pi via SSH and continue the setup.
Change the Locale and Keyboard layout if needed:
Set 'DE' for German: sudo sed -i 's/XKBLAYOUT="gb"/XKBLAYOUT="de"/g' /etc/default/keyboard Change your Locale: sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales and your timezone: sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Install updates
sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade sudo apt upgrade
Update firmware
sudo rpi-update # Get current installed firmware version sudo vcgencmd version Oct 17 2023 15:42:39 Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom version 30f0c5e4d076da3ab4f341d88e7d505760b93ad7 (clean) (release) (start)
Optionally
Optionally install some elementary packages to make life easier 😉
sudo apt install vim dnsutils
If you want to activate autologin or some other devices, use raspi-config tool
sudo raspi-config
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