Setting Up a Headless Raspberry Pi

Introduction

As part of the homelabbing series, we'll be going over setting up a beginner-friendly homelab by first installing the operating system—that of which will be running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. In consideration of hardware limitations, we will aim to minimize the weight of system services by installing an operating system without a desktop environment.

Requirements

- Raspberry Pi, or similar host system

- a microSD card, which will be used for storage

- an adapter that will allow a computer to read/write to this storage device.

- the ability to log into your home router's admin dashboard

Guide

We will move forward with using the Raspberry Pi Imager. This streamlines the process in which we install an operating system to the RPi.

Selecting the Device

Once your microSD card is seen by your computer, open the Raspberry Pi Imager.

Click >Choose Device. For my case, I will be selecting >Raspberry Pi 3 from the dropdown menu.

Selecting the Operating System

Ideally, we would want an operating system that is widely supported, easy to maintain, and familiar to use. For this, I'll be using the long-term support version of Ubuntu Server. At the time of writing, the most recent version is Ubuntu Server 24.04.2 LTS.

Selecting the Storage

Just choose your microSD card from the list.

Customizing the OS

Clicking "Next", a dialogue box pops up asking if we would like to apply custom OS settings.

Click "Edit Settings". Here, you can customize the settings to your liking. I'm going to be leaving the hostname as the default value, but customizing my username, password, and locale.

In addition, I will also enable SSH.

Save the settings, then click 'Yes'. There will be another prompt asking about continuing with erasing the current data on the disk. Click 'Yes' once more.

Verifying that the write was successful, we can eject the media and plug the microSD card into the RPi. Plugging in the RPi and connecting it by ethernet to a network switch, or directly into an access point of your choice will allow us to verify that Ubuntu is accessible on the network.

Setting a Static IP Address for the Raspberry Pi (Highly Recommended)

Its highly recommended for a static IP address to be set for the RPi, as a homelab should be consistently accessible and easily found on a network. The easiest method is to log into your home router's admin dashboard, navigate to the settings, and set the IP address of your preference. Another method is to change the netplan settings in Ubuntu.

After setting the IP address of my RPi in my router's settings, I had to reboot the device. This can be done either by using ssh and running the 'sudo reboot' command, or simply unplugging and replugging the power cord for the RPi.

Verifying SSH Connectivity

In a terminal emulator of your choice, make sure that ssh is installed, and run the command

1ssh your_username@ip.address
2
3### Example below
4ssh robeeds@10.10.10.1
Copy

Enter your credentials, and you should be able to log in.

Success!

Now that we've successfully installed Ubuntu Server LTS onto a Raspberry Pi, we can move forward with setting up cool tools and services that can improve the performance and security of our network in the near future.