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Installing Raspbian from NOOBS without display V2.1 and beyond

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So it appears there have been significant changes to the "New Out Of the Box Software" (NOOBS) system with version 2.1 and beyond. According to the release notes included with the package:

2016-11-25: * SSH disabled by default; can be enabled by creating a file with name "ssh" in boot partition

There has been some pretty good discussion on why there is a change.

The boot partition on a Pi should be accessible from any machine with an SD card reader, on Windows, Mac, or Linux. If you want to enable SSH, all you need to do is to put a file called ssh in the /boot/ directory. The contents of the file donât matter: it can contain any text you like, or even nothing at all. When the Pi boots, it looks for this file; if it finds it, it enables SSH and then deletes the file. SSH can still be turned on or off from the Raspberry Pi Configuration application or raspi-config; this is simply an additional way to turn it on if you canât easily run either of those applications.

But wait. Boot partition? Where is that? With the NOOBS system, you simply copy a few files and directories over to the SD card, then boot the card with the Raspberry Pi. There isn't an actual /boot/ directory. Clearly just adding a ssh file to the root directory on the SD card is a fail. Ditto for adding an ssh file to the OS directory. That failed too.

Anybody been here before? Since 11.25.2015, how does one enable a headless system accessible via SSH?

Note: A previous answer on this issue, Installing Raspbian from NOOBS without display no longer is applicable to the latest version of NOOBS. So no, this question isn't a duplicate of that one. There is no file flavours.json. There is no file recovery.cmdline.

And here's a file listing of the unzipped Noobs root folder: raspbian ssh noobs setup
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edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:56 asked Dec 26 '16 at 8:05 add a comment |

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So it turns out I was doing it wrong (or not using the tools as originally intended). I received a nice response from Simon Long, the author of the blog entry referenced above:

The /boot/folder isnât visible on a NOOBS card â use Etcher (from http://etcher.io) to flash the standard Raspbian PIXEL image â not the NOOBS image â to an SD card. The /boot/ partition will be visible on the resulting SD card as the only thing mountable by Windows.

As I look thru the raspberrypi.org website, I do see this link, currently showing two different compiled images of Raspbian Jessie.

Now that makes a whole lot of sense. No NOOBS for an SSH implementation, have a nice day. Many thanks to Simon Long and the folks supporting raspberrypi.org

Note: there was some considerable discussion of this issue at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=166984&p=1075797#p1075797, but ultimately, using NOOBS without a keyboard/mouse/monitor really isn't an intended usage case. The Simon Long response really makes more sense.

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edited Dec 26 '16 at 21:06
answered Dec 26 '16 at 20:53 up vote 2 down vote

You say that there is no recovery.cmdline. However, if you take a closer look at the image you have supplied you will see it there. I have just installed using VNC by adding vncinstall to the end of the recovery.cmdline file. So the file should look like this

runinstaller quiet ramdisk_size=32768 root=/dev/ram0 init=/init vt.cur_default=1 elevator=deadline vncinstall

I've downloaded and using NOOBS v2.1.0.

After the Pi booted, I just had to find it's IP Address. I did this by logging into my Router to find it.

answered Jan 4 '17 at 21:58 up vote 0 down vote

The latest version of NOOBS should look for the ssh file on its Windows-readable partition.

answered Jun 7 '17 at 2:14 Noah Andrews

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged raspbian ssh noobs setup or ask your own question.


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