Setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W
I have already quite a zoo of Single-Board Computers running Debian derivates, but the latest pet Raspberry Pi Zero W was the first missing standard ethernet.
After all the initial setup including networking and SSH is not dramatically complicated and I was not forced to connect keyboard and video:
Download and Writing to microSD
Download latest Raspbian Stretch Lite image and put the image on an microSD card with at least 4GB (better 8GB) capacity.
I used the standard dd if=*.img of=/dev/... status=progress
on the
double-checked device for the microSD (lsblk
).
If you want to minimize the risk of disk destruction I recommend the
Ether Tool instead of dd
.
SSH Service on Boot
Activate access to the 1st (boot
) and 2nd (root
) partition of the card.
First create an empty file ssh
on the 1st (boot
) partition. This will
activate the SSH Service on standard port 22 on boot.
Background
The sshswitch.service
unit will only enable the SSH Service, if
/boot/ssh
or /boot/ssh.txt
exists. Since the pi
user provides admin
privileges by sudo
, and the initial password raspberry
is well-known, you
should be aware of the consequences and change this password immediately.
Introduce WiFi Credentials
Before booting from this microSD for the first time please edit the
etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
on the 2nd (root
) partition and
introduce your favorite WLANs.
In the following example I set the country code of the WiFi to the placeholder
CC
, please replace it by the ISO
Code
matching your location:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
country=CC
network={
ssid="WLAN-SSID-01"
#psk="WPA-Password-01"
psk=348b6a4648bbd19148b3ee4441a87776abe62ef732f567aa86f121d6b414f4da
priority=1
}
network={
ssid="WLAN-SSID-02"
#psk="WPA-Password-02"
psk=660a6293ecdc6580f8f2917c60d44968c1610604f22ee5df34e315ed5584d98a
priority=2
}
The network
definitions in the file are best generated by the
wpa_passphrase
tool available on neary any Linux providing WiFi support.
Missing that tool you have still the options of booting without networking
falling back to keyboard and display. After login with user pi
and password
raspberry
you can use that tool on the Raspberry Zero itself.
Perhaps it’s also possible to use clear text passwords in the psk
setting.
Linux-enabled users can run wpa_passphrase SSID PASSPHRASE
to get the
complete network definition, ready to be pasted into the
wpa_supplicant.conf
. The priority
settings are optional.
Boot
After disconnecting the microSD card and plugging it into the Raspberry Zero you only need power by Micro USB and a defined network within reach to successfully boot the device.
In my case I queried the IP address in my DHCP Service and was able to login to the new member of my LAN within 2 minutes.
One of the first tasks is passwd
after logging in as user pi
(standard
password raspberry
). Starting sudo raspi-config
will provide further
configuration options.