Your first RPi Experience

Continuïng where we left on out first OS on an sd card we’ll go to the first boot, finding out our IP address given that your network has DHCP enabled, and exploring the terminal of the Pi.

Booting your Pi

To start you’ll have to insert the newly burned SD card into the PI.
The SD card slot can be found on the bottom of the RPi for all B models.

After inserting the SD card you’ll want to insert the network (unless you are going to use the wifi we set up in the burning process. If required you can also plug in your monitor and mouse/keyboard setup.

Then all that is remaining is to add power to your RPi and all should boot. On first boot it’ll take a while as the OS will configure the SD card and do some initial configurations. Give it a minute or 5.

Connecting to the Pi

If you have a monitor and keyboard you can get directly into the terminal (unless you have the desktop version installed, in that case you’ll need to open it)
Type ip a to check your IP address

Now if you don’t have a monitor connected there are a few options in getting your Pi’s ip address. The first one is to connect to your router and check the DHCP lease table. As there are so many different types of routers and software for it i won’t show it here how this is accomplished. You’ll have to google the model number of your router to get a detailed tutorial.

The other way is a bit more trickier, but in some cases the only one possible. Now actually there are 2 ways left but for one of them you’ll need a piece of software called nmap. This is easily installed on linux by the following command (debian linux version):

sudo apt install nmap

There is a windows version for this but i am more for the mobaXterm version. More about mobaXterm and how to use it here.

We’ll use MobaXterm as our SSH client. Open a new terminal and ssh into your pi using its hostname.

ssh 'username'@'hostname'.local

replace ‘username’ and ‘hostname’ with the ones you set up in the burning process. For example if you didn’t change anything during the burning process:

ssh [email protected]

Now if this does not work in your network, you can use the network scanner tool that is integrated in mobaxterm which is similar to using nmap.

You’ll be asked to input your password, if you did not change anything this will be raspberry.
Once in the raspberry pi terminal you can get the ip by entering ‘ip a’

In my case i’m connected to both ethernet as wifi and thus i have 2 IP’s. if this worked you don’t really need to know the IP address of the PI thought it is conveniënt to know it.

Conclusion

Now that we are connected to the ssh session of the RPi we can do anything we want with it. So don’t be afraid to browse my site, or any other one for that matter, to get inspired on what to do next.