This tutorial will provide you with a step by step process for installing and communicating with your raspberry pi headless (without any monitor, keyboard or mouse connected with your raspberry pi). Though Raspberry Pi comes with a graphics display port and multiple USB ports which can be used to connect keyboard and monitor, I did not not have a spare set of input-output device for my raspberry Pi. All I wanted to do it connect it with my home network and remotely work on it.  I hope you find this tutorial useful.

Before we start

Checklist

Installation of the OS

Connectivity of Raspberry Pi

Find the ip address of your Raspberry Pi

Once the Pi is up and running we shall need to discover the IP address from the local network. We can do that easily by running a network scan over the local network. Install the IPscanner tool and follow these steps.

login with ssh:

login: pi
password: raspberry

Raspbian graphical desktop of your Pi from a PC or Mac

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Press "y" to continue

vncserver :1

Ensure the tightvnc server starts on reboot

cd /home/pi/.config/autostart
nano tightvnc.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=TightVNC
Exec=vncserver :1
StartupNotify=false

sudo reboot

Post installation Optional configurations

After the installation is completed you may want to change the following configurations:

Setting up appropriate time zone:

Raspberry Pi has no hardware clock built in. As I understand, it loads time information via ntp server every time it boots.  If there is no internet connection, we may need to set the time manually for certain applications to work. Either the way, we shall need to setup timezone for the newly installed system

sudo raspi-config

you shall see a text interface, select (use tab and arrow keys to navigate)

1. “Internationalisation Options” using arrow key and navigate to select using tab and press enter
2. Highlight “Change timezone” and enter on select
3. Select appropriate “geographic area” and enter on ok
4. Select “Time zone” and click ok.

Time zone is set now.

Expand file system, Raspberry Pi(reclaim unused memory card space):

To install Raspberry Pi, you shall require a minimum of 4GB memory card. However, if you have installed the system in a larger card(example 8GB or higher), after the installation the maximum available storage shall still be 4 GB. To reclaim all unused space use the following setps:

df -h

Above will display the size of system root pertition

to expand to the unused space, use the following command

sudo raspi-config

you shall see a text interface, select (use tab and arrow keys to navigate)

1. Select “Expand file system” and press enter.

This shall prompt you with the message saying the “partition table has been altered” ands shall prompt you for a reboot after you exit the raspi-confi. After the reboot run

df -h

The above command output will help you confirm that the unused space has been added to the system root partition.