Connecting using SSH

So I have installed Raspbian on an SD card and got the Raspberry PI to boot - so now what.

As my desk is rather cluttered I would like remove the keyboard and mouse from the Raspberry PI and connect to it through a window on my main PC over my local network. A good solution to this is to use SSH (Secure Shell). When I first installed Raspbian I used the raspi-config utility to enable the SSH server which is disabled by default. If you did not do this the you can change the setting by running "sudo raspi-config" from the command prompt. You will see the use of the "sudo" command a lot. It is used to run a program with raised privileges that are required to change some system settings.

Once the SSH server is enabled it is a simple matter of using a program like PuTTY to connect to the Raspberry PI. The only hard thing to using SSH is knowing what the IP address of the Raspberry PI is. If you have a screen and keyboard connected the IP address can be found by typing "ifconfig" at a command prompt. The network IP address is shown as the "inet addr" on the second line of "eth0". However, depending on how your network is setup it could get a different IP address every time you turn on the Raspberry PI. Having the display and keyboard connected to just find out the IP address kind of goes against the benefit of SSH. On my network I have configured my Router to assign a fixed IP address to the Raspberry PI. This then makes it simple (just need to remember the address) to connect over SSH. Alternatively there are many applications that will scan your network and show a list of connected devices and their addresses. The one I use on my network is Advanced-ip-scanner but there are many others.

So I now have a window on my main PC with a connection to the Raspberry PI and some desk space back.

One limitation of using PuTTY and SSH is that you only get a command prompt. You cannot run the GUI. If you type the command "startx" you will have to connect you display and mouse to be able to exit (logout) of the GUI desktop.