So at some point i wanted to access my Raspberry Pi without the need to have it always hooked up to my (or any) screen. So I looked it up and collected all the needs and the problems with its solutions.
First of all, you need a running Wheezy installation. It needs to be hooked up to your network and to the internet. After that you need to connect yourself with your regular operating System onto the console of the Pi. I use therefore PuTTY which is a common program for these things under windows. Download it and make an SSH connection into your Pi.
After that to start we simply update the Raspberry to the latest Version. To do that use the following command:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
You will need to confirm that you want to update and that these updates will take some more space on your partition. Depending on the state of your device, this might take some time. Have a break…
This is not really needed to install the remote desktop server, but it is always good to have the latest version of the programs so that errors which might occur are reduced to the maximum! Now we can come to the main part.
To be able to connect to the Desktop we will use a tool called XRDP. To install it you need to insert the following command
sudo apt-get install xrdp
Again you will need to confirm that you want to install it and after that all the needed stuff is installed. After that a reboot of the device should be done.
sudo shutdown -r now
When the device comes back up the complete process should be finished. All you will need is to connect yourself with your RDP Program to your Raspberry. In Windows you can use the Standard tool “Remote Desktop” for that. You will need to enter the IP of your Raspberry. See my screen-shot as an example (it is in German but it should be similar in English) and simply click connect.
When everything went right you should be seeing a login screen similar to this:
So if you reached as far, you did everything right! But there might be some problems logging in…
The language Problem
Some more informations for people with having issues logging in. If you came to that screen everything is working fine. If you cant log in, there might be an other problem with your keyboard! In the field of the username you can test your keyboard to see if all your keystrokes are transmitted the correct way. This is a language issue. Here comes the solution i had to look for on a few places on the net.
SSH again into your Pi. Then you need to go tho the following location /etc/xrdp so you have to use the following command for this:
cd /etc/xrdp/
After that you can use the command ls to see which files this directory contains. It s all about km-????.ini files (???? stands for numbers corresponding to the country code). Initially xrdp uses km-0409.ini (English) but I want to use a German Keyboard so i should be using the km-0407.ini. The country codes can be found here. Not all the ini Files are on your device but Google should be able to help you to find them. You simply need to copy them into the same folder and do the same trick.
To start, we will create a copy of the original km-0409.ini which we will name km-0409-copy.ini with the command:
sudo cp km-0409.ini km-0409-copy.ini
After that we copy the German layout (km-0407.ini) over the Original Version (km-0409.ini)
sudo cp km-0407.ini km-0409.ini
Finally the xrdp program needs to be restarted which we do with the command
sudo /etc/init.d/xrdp restart
After that use your Remote Desktop Program to login and your keyboard strokes should arrive the correct way on your Pi.
Mission Accomplished! Now you can enjoy your Pi on your regular system without hooking it extra to a screen. Okay there might be some limitations but regular stuff works anyway!
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