Setting up a headless Raspberry Pi in minutes

To continue on my Linux excitement, I have purchased a Raspberry Pi for home automation. Since I had no intent to connect it to any screen, I was worried this would still be necessary for the setup, like it is for a traditional PC (with TV/monitor, mouse, keyboard and so on…).

Fortunately, this was not necessary! Here are the steps taken :

1. setup a SD card with Raspbian as per the instructions on the official Raspbebby Pi page
2. plug the Raspberry Pi to my DSL router using a network cable
3. plug the power cord
4. let it boot, it takes on my side about 20 seconds, your milage may vary based on the specs of your SD card
5. from another machine on my home network, ssh on host raspberrypi. The login is pi and the password raspberry

You are then prompted to perform basic setup.

pi@raspberrypi's password: 
Linux raspberrypi 3.10.25+ #622 PREEMPT Fri Jan 3 18:41:00 GMT 2014 armv6l

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.

NOTICE: the software on this Raspberry Pi has not been fully configured. Please run 'sudo raspi-config'

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo raspi-config

And voilà : a PC setup in a few minutes only!