I’ve been trying to get my pi-3 setup so that I can run it headless and still fully control it. I’ve found that the pi support node with opens up many possibilities for using it for prototyping work.

After moving it off the guest WiFi (easy oops but no in-house access) and making sure it has a valid IPv4 address I had to find the default username and password (pi and raspberry). Changed the password but I’m not yet ready to add an account (sudoers list and other such isn’t something I want to struggle with at the moment).

Enabled SSH and that seems to be working normally now. I used the text GUI to get this working. I still need to generate a key pair and load the public key onto the pi for convenience.

I’m still working on getting desktop access up and running. I enabled the default VNC server that comes with the pi (realvnc I think). I can connect using the realvnc viewer. So far if I have a display connected this works reasonably. If I run headless then the screen size defaults to 640×480 which is effectively unusable.

I’ve seen suggestions of using the xrandr command on the target. That runs but the only resolution that is supported seems to be 640×480.

I’ve been trying to install tighvnc instead but have been getting fetch errors. Not sure whether I need to add repositories or tightvnc may not be supported on the ARM. We’ll see…