LibraryMakers - Accessing your Raspberry Pi remotely using tightvncserver

Accessing your Raspberry Pi remotely using tightvncserver

Intro

If you don’t have access to a monitor and keyboard or just because it can be more convenient, you may want to access your Raspberry Pi from your laptop or desktop computer.

There are a few different ways to do this but in this tutorial we’re going to log in and access our Raspberry Pi remotely using Virtual Network Computing (VNC). VNC is a way of sharing desktops so you can remotely control another computer.

TightVNC is a cross-platform ,open-source remote desktop software application.

What you need

Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 with internet connection

How

First, make sure everything is up to date on your Raspberry Pi by running:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now, we need to install the TightVNC server package from the command line by running:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Next, start the VNC server. You can also specify the dimensions of the graphical view of the remote desktop:

tightvncserver :1 -geometry 1024x640 -depth 24 -dpi 64

Now, back to your main computer. Download a VNC viewer to your computer. There’s a list of available options listed at:

https://www.realvnc.com/download/viewer/

It should direct you to the most popular choice for your operating system.

For Mac, it’s VNC Viewer.

VNC Viewer 1

When you open up VNC Viewer, you will be prompted to log in to your Raspberry Pi using the IP address and the Display number (which is likely set to 1 unless you specified otherwise)

VNC Viewer 2

And then, finally, set the 8 character password you set for the VNC server .

And huzzah.

You will then have access to your Raspberry Pi desktop. It won’t be fullscreen but it’s still a lot easier to navigate than SSH or other non-graphical ways.

VNC Viewer 3