If you search for Raspberry Pi online there's a good chance that fairly quickly you will encounter someone "accessing their Raspberry Pi remotely" or using a "Headless System." It helps immediately if you think of the head of a computer as the monitor, the point at which it communicates information to you! So we want to be able to look at what our Pi is doing, without having it connected to a monitor. Wizards! Magic! However, believe it or not, it's not as far fetched as it seems. We can use the magic of Remote Access to see the command line of our Raspberry Pi and much much more, using our normal Windows, Mac OSX or Linux Desktop! This is useful, because it means we don't need our pi connected to a monitor to see what it's doing, it can go anywhere where this is an internet connection or a connection to a router.
The first and easiest way to access our Pi remotely is to use a technique called SSH (Secure Shell)! This allows us remote access over a Local Network to our Raspberry Pi's command line. Here's how it works:
Firstly you need to make sure you have your Pi Booted up running Raspbian - if you are using a different operating system then this tutorial will not work :S - and connected to a monitor (for one last time!). It is good practice to run the commands before making any substantial changes to your Pi :
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo rpi-update
These commands perform updates to any currently installed packages, as well as upgrading any of the system OS and the system firmware! After this is done we can get into the main project! Start by making sure you have SSH enabled on your Pi, you can do this by going into Rasp-Config and enabling SSH. Type this command into your terminal:
sudo raspi-config
hostname -I
(That is a capital i) Write down the Pi's IP address on a piece of paper, then unplug the pi from the monitor without turning it off. Replug your monitor into your computer so that you can see your normal desktop. We now need to install a program called "Putty," if you are running MAC OSX or Linux then you can find separate programs for your operating systems by searching SSH Client [your OS] online.