We were dealing with command line from the start. In fact Raspberry Pi also has desktop environment. It can be started one-off by command “startx”, or it can be launched on boot, which can be set on raspi-config:
- sudo raspi-config
Select Option 3 Boot Option, go to Desktop/CLI and choose Desktop. Exit raspi-config and reboot, now we can see it boots into desktop environment.
Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is the remote login to desktop. The latest disk image has RealVNC preinstalled, but it’s not turned on by default. This is also set on raspi-config. Go to Advance Option, select VNC and choose yes to allow remote desktop. Then reboot the device.
On the PC side, RealVNC client is available at https://www.realvnc.com/download/vnc/. After installation of VNC Viewer, we can connect to Raspberry Pi with its IP address, username and password.
Now we can access command line and desktop remotely, which is a lot more flexible than sitting on a monitor. For even more flexibility, we can setup access over the internet next.