Pi Scream
Well that was a full day. My objective was to connect the Raspberry Pi to my laptop so that I could use the laptop screen and keyboard.
Seven hours in and I have discovered that things are a lot harder than they seem.
The first attempt was via a network cable. - http://pihw.wordpress.com/guides/direct-network-connection/
Ran through all of this and I managed to get 'Putty' working. This program allowed me to access the terminal remotely. But I wanted to access the pretty screen with the Raspberry on it.
Unfortunately I needed to do some 'Updates' on the 'Wi-Fi'. I have a wi-fi dongle, two or three actually. I looked up how to connect to wi-fi and found several pages like this one - http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md
And nothing worked. I tried several different programming recipes but got nothing. This website - http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/ took me entirely astray.
A few hours later, after adding in a powered USB hub in case the dongle needed extra power (it didn't) I set all of the console commands back to how they were originally and using the desktop (GUI) controls. I'd been getting a message that the Wi-Fi Application could't find the wpa_supplicant, but putting the wpa_supplicant and network/interfaces back to how they were originally fixed it.
After re-typing my wifi password several times, it finally connected.
So then I could run the updates and get the tightvncserver - this is a program that lets you run the desktop remotely from another computer. http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/windows.md
Install the VNC viewer on your Windows laptop, install VNC server on the Pi and you're away.
Of course, things are never that easy. You need to know the IP of your Pi, which is easily findable if you type ifconfig into the LXTerminal on the Pi. It's a series of numbers like 192.168.1.200. But when you connect, you also need to type in the port number after two colons - so 192.168.1.200::5901. Took me an hour to find that out.
By 6pm I could see the Pi desktop on my laptop! The next stage was to write a script so the Pi would automatically run the VNC server on startup.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/README.md
You write a small file that runs the VNC. You save it, then you need to make it executable. But when I tried to use 'chmod' to change the properties of the vnc.sh, it told me that I couldn't.
For some reason.
I haven't cried today, but I have thought about it. A friend of mine told me to install Linux because it's so powerful and easy to use. But I knew it'd be like this. A whole day and I've got almost nowhere, even with the vast resources of the internet. I wanted to learn how to do these things myself and I do have some knowledge. But it seems I've spent all day tripping up over my bloody shoelaces.
Seven hours in and I have discovered that things are a lot harder than they seem.
The first attempt was via a network cable. - http://pihw.wordpress.com/guides/direct-network-connection/
Ran through all of this and I managed to get 'Putty' working. This program allowed me to access the terminal remotely. But I wanted to access the pretty screen with the Raspberry on it.
Unfortunately I needed to do some 'Updates' on the 'Wi-Fi'. I have a wi-fi dongle, two or three actually. I looked up how to connect to wi-fi and found several pages like this one - http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md
And nothing worked. I tried several different programming recipes but got nothing. This website - http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/ took me entirely astray.
A few hours later, after adding in a powered USB hub in case the dongle needed extra power (it didn't) I set all of the console commands back to how they were originally and using the desktop (GUI) controls. I'd been getting a message that the Wi-Fi Application could't find the wpa_supplicant, but putting the wpa_supplicant and network/interfaces back to how they were originally fixed it.
After re-typing my wifi password several times, it finally connected.
So then I could run the updates and get the tightvncserver - this is a program that lets you run the desktop remotely from another computer. http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/windows.md
Install the VNC viewer on your Windows laptop, install VNC server on the Pi and you're away.
Of course, things are never that easy. You need to know the IP of your Pi, which is easily findable if you type ifconfig into the LXTerminal on the Pi. It's a series of numbers like 192.168.1.200. But when you connect, you also need to type in the port number after two colons - so 192.168.1.200::5901. Took me an hour to find that out.
By 6pm I could see the Pi desktop on my laptop! The next stage was to write a script so the Pi would automatically run the VNC server on startup.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/README.md
You write a small file that runs the VNC. You save it, then you need to make it executable. But when I tried to use 'chmod' to change the properties of the vnc.sh, it told me that I couldn't.
For some reason.
I haven't cried today, but I have thought about it. A friend of mine told me to install Linux because it's so powerful and easy to use. But I knew it'd be like this. A whole day and I've got almost nowhere, even with the vast resources of the internet. I wanted to learn how to do these things myself and I do have some knowledge. But it seems I've spent all day tripping up over my bloody shoelaces.