General RPi Headless Setup

Download the Raspberry Pi Imager and use it to write the Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit) to a microSD card.

Eject the microSD card and insert it again to have the new file system recognized, then add ipv6.disable=1 to the single line in the file cmdline.txt.

Eject the microSD card once more, insert it into the RPi and power on the RPi. After some time the microSD card activity LED slows down significantly, then check if the RPi IPv4 address can be determined by mDNS with

ping raspberrypi.local

If that works for you, note down the IPv4 address given. If it doesn't work, there are other options to find out the RPi IPv4 address including:

• Your DHCP server (usually running on your WAN router) allows you to look up the IPv4 addresses it has provided. The RPi should show up as raspberrypi.
• You attach a display onetime to the HDMI port of the RPi. At the end of the boot the RPi displays a message saying My IP address is <addr>.

Connect to the RPi via its IPv4 address with an SSH client. On Windows this is best done using PuTTY.

Remove the Message of the Day with

sudo rm /etc/motd

Bring up the Raspberry Pi Software Configuration Tool with

sudo raspi-config

• Select 1 System Options-> S4 Hostname and change the hostname from raspberrypi to apple2.
• Select <Finish> to quit and choose <Yes> to reboot.

If mDNS works for you, you can from now on connect to the RPi via apple2.local. Otherwise continue to connect to it via its IPv4 address.

Make sure the RPi is up to date with

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Note: Like every computer running Linux, the RPi doesn't like to be just powered off. So either get into the habit of shutting it down cleanly via sudo halt or simply keep it powered on all of the time. If you consider both options as a no-go then at least make sure to backup your microSD card after you have configured everything your way. On Windows this can be done using Win32DiskImager.