Turnkey headless Raspberry Pi 2

There's also this option, which I found worked very well on XP, though it seems not to have been updated since 2012.

We were talking about command windows (whether they were running telnet or not). I thought you were talking about them too when you spoke about copying commands.

Windows command prompts can be set to start with Quick Edit mode enabled and, as Dennis said, then just one extra click is needed.

In fact, to paste to the same window it is effectively a double right click.

James

Definitely not on W95.

If they were around on XP they were well hidden or, as others have said, third party extensions.

After XP I lost both interest and need to know and haven't used any more recent version.

Took them quite some time to wake up to the advantages, then.

Amen to that....

-- Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. ? Erwin Knoll

win3 w/ xerox rooms:

That does seem to have been the watershed for quite a few of us.

Windows NT for me.

The last standalone windows I used was win 98.

After that I reckoned Linux was nearly good enough, and used VMware to supply the windows I still needed.

Now about 12 years later, I still have an XP in a virtual(box) machine, but I seldom need to use it.

I was already using Linux for 2.5 years before Windows 95 was even released. At that time the state of the art in Windows was 3.11 and it was not difficult to see that Linux was vastly superior.

But when Windows 2000 and XP were released, and I was administering the workstations and servers at work that were running it, I started to see that those had their good points as well. Windows 2003 was the best server OS.

After that, I have only witnessed the system requirements going up and the performance going down, the user interface becoming clumsy, and the productivity for office use going down the drain. It may be more fun for some types of home users.

Unfortunately Linux has jumped on that same bandwagon. Todays Linux systems are just as complicated and unpredictable as Windows, due to the inclusion of crap like systemd.

I think the problem os bored and out of control developers, mainly in the graphical area, though. Gnome 2 used to be quite good until its developers started to 'fix' it, got bored and left it less functional than before. Then they produced that heap of shit known as Gnome 3. At that point I switched to XFCE which did more or less exactly what I wanted from a desktop.

But, the style-over-substance wankers got loose on XFCE recently and have made its scrolling text windows almost unusable for large pieces of text by removing the clickable small movement buttons from the vertical scroll bar (now try moving up or down by half the window in a 10,000 line document) and restricting the action of enabling keyboard scrolling by only clicking in the information area at the top of the window (any click in the window used to enable it - now you have to go back to the top of the text, click to enable and then try to find where you were) because any loss of focus disables keyboard scrolling.

I'd disagree there. I admit I didn't like systemd at first because it was unfamiliar but now, several Fedora versions later, it just works (and I've learned to configure it).

I'm far less happy with GRUB2, which seems to be an arbitrarily overcomplex mess with no added advantages when compared with GRUB 1.

On x86 boxes I use Mint with Mate - which Gnome2 where it is supposed to be. I tried Cinnamon (Gnome3 variant), but didn't like it as much. Mate doesn't seem to be available for Raspbian yet, but I hope gets included in a future release.

---ruck

Most definitely.

That worked. The Pi's first boot into Raspbian brought up an accessible prompt even with no display attached to the Pi, and even no keyboard. Notes below in case they are of use to someone else.

I bought Pi2, PSU, case and blank micro SD separately, and followed the instructions on raspberrypi.org to write the raspbian image to the card.

Without any keyboard or display attached (the only connections were power and Ethernet), the Pi's first boot into Raspbian picked up a DHCP address. I used Wireshark (on XP) to watch for DHCP activity as it booted in order to find out what address it issued a DhcpRequest for.

...

First access was using PuTTY and then Telnet was set up with

sudo apt-get install telnetd

No configuration was required.

I have not set up Samba yet. IIRC that can be a nightmare, partly because of the different Windows security models....

One advantage I found that PuTTY has over the default Windows telnet client is its rendering of graphics characters and screen positions - useful for the initial sudo raspi-config.

James

...

I now have Samba working. It was almost as much of a pain as before. Fortunately, this time I was able to use my old smb.conf as a model but even then it didn't work. It turned out that I had to run smbpasswd but that command is not included in the default Raspbian distribution for some reason. I found help at

That page says that smbpasswd is in package samba-common-bin which needs to be apt-got(!)

James

I just started using my rPi headless and I don't recall having to do anything on the Pi itself. As someone mentioned, you need the IP address which I was able to get from my router, better still I told the router what number to assign to the rPi so that I could make it the same every time and in multiple locations where I have access to the router setup.

I am using it as the interface to a launchpad which is my target device for an embedded application. I am finding it to be very robust and easy to work with... other than the fact that I know little about Linux and am having to learn new stuff every day.

I am running SSH on a PC using Putty and also use WinSCP for file transfers.