Headless Raspberry Pi 4

1337

Got a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and thought I'd give it a spin. Unfortunately the new model has micro hdmi outputs and that I don't have. So had to research how to get it up and running without any monitor which isn't too difficult.

DOWNLOAD IMAGE
Go to https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
Here I'm going with Raspbian Buster Lite which is a Debian 10 minimal install for the RPi - more or less.

BURN IMAGE
Burn the image to a microSD card with your favorite tool. I used etcher. https://www.balena.io/etcher/

MAKE SSH START
After having burned the image to the microSD card, mount the card and add an empty file called ssh in the root directory. This will make Raspian start the ssh service on boot up.

BOOT UP
Put the microSD card in the RPi, a network cable and boot it up. Boot will take about 20 seconds and it will automatically resize the partition to the full size of your microSD card. Network setup is with dhcp.

SSH
After you find the ip address of the RPi ssh login is:
user: pi
password: raspberry

CONFIGURATION
For some configuration options run:
sudo raspi-config

Also to update the repository do
sudo apt update
And if need be upgrade any packages to newer versions:
sudo apt upgrade

DustinB3403

@Pete-S They dropped the full size hdmi. . . boo.

1337

It's running kernel 4.19.
Dmesg shows that boot takes about 12 seconds.

It's using EXT4.

Model: SD SC16G (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 15.9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      4194kB  273MB   268MB   primary  fat32        lba
 2      277MB   15.9GB  15.7GB  primary  ext4

With a 16GB card:

root@raspberrypi:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        15G  1.2G   13G   9% /
devtmpfs        1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           2.0G  8.4M  1.9G   1% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1  253M   40M  213M  16% /boot
tmpfs           391M     0  391M   0% /run/user/1000

Memory used:

root@raspberrypi:~# free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        3999792       91920     3826840        8584       81032     3788900
Swap:        102396           0      102396

1337

@DustinB3403 said in Headless Raspberry Pi 4:

@Pete-S They dropped the full size hdmi. . . boo.

I agree!

1337

iperf with RPi as server

root@raspberrypi:~# iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  4] local xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 5001 connected with xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 57083
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   901 MBytes   754 Mbits/sec

iperf with RPi as client

root@raspberrypi:~# iperf -c xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:  149 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 48180 connected with xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   972 MBytes   815 Mbits/sec

1337

This version 4 feels snappy, like you are running on a "real" computer.
But storage speed is more like an old harddrive compared to a modern server with SSD drives. To bad they didn't put a SATA or something on it.

Serving up some pages on apache or nginx is no problem. Ansible installs fine. Packages in Raspbian seems to be just about the entire Debian repository for whatever odd thing you want.

It's for sure the best Raspberry Pi so far. Can be used for a lot more things than the old version 3.