A few months ago, we recommended several programs to manage two or more computers without extra hardware. Naturally, this possibility extends to Linux systems as well, and given the characteristics of a machine like the Raspberry Pi, remote administration fits perfectly. The main and best-supported suggestion on the Raspberry Pi is to use VNC, and today we’ll explain how to enable it.
If you have a Raspberry Pi and the idea of connecting mouse, keyboard and screen feels inconvenient, don’t worry. The software offers a very robust alternative through VNC, and when you add the PIXEL operating system, configuring it is quite simple. Everything starts with the Raspberry Pi itself. Depending on the version, PIXEL can work wonderfully, need a few tweaks, or not be an option. The advantage of PIXEL is that it already includes the vncserver component preinstalled. According to the official Raspberry Pi site, this condition extends to previous versions of Raspbian, although it needs to be enabled manually, and all the relevant details can be found here.
Find Your Pi on the Network
Before we continue with the tutorial, let’s assume the Raspberry Pi is connected to the local network and powered on. With no mouse-keyboard-monitor, there are many things we don’t know about the Pi, starting with its IP address. A quick visit to the router would suffice, but there’s a better way: use the Adafruit Pi Finder application. Download a copy for your operating system, run it, click the “Find my Pi” button, and once it’s located (this may take a while) click the button labeled “Terminal”. This will open an SSH session with the Raspberry Pi (the default user is “pi” and the password is “raspberry”). Inside the terminal, type “vncserver” and press Enter.
Connect with VNC Viewer
After running vncserver, you’ll see a line that looks something like “raspberrypi:3”, followed by an IP address (of the mini computer) with a slightly altered format, e.g., 192.168.2.10:3. Take note of that address, because you’ll need it in the next step, which is to get VNC Viewer. Download, install, and in the VNC Server section enter the address exactly as shown in the terminal (192.168.2.10:3 in our example), with pi as the username and raspberry as the password. If everything goes well, VNC Viewer will open a window revealing the Raspberry Pi desktop, ready to use.
Make VNC Start Automatically
But that’s not all! Unless you want to go via SSH and type vncserver every time, the suggestion is to configure that service and have it start automatically with the Raspberry Pi. Open a terminal, type “sudo raspi-config”, go to the section labeled “Advanced Options”, and then choose the VNC option to enable vncserver permanently. Now we’re done. If the administration is going to be on a local network, keeping the pi/raspberry credentials shouldn’t cause problems, but if the plan is different, don’t hesitate to take the necessary precautions.
