From charlesreid1

WARNING: These instructions are old. Some of the details may not stay the same, but the concepts will not change.

UPDATE: See RaspberryPi/July 2020 for up-to-date instructions for installing Ubuntu 18.04 and getting the headless Pi connected to wifi

Interfacing with Headless Raspberry Pi

Step 1: Modify Raspberry Pi boot sequence

Plug the SD card into your computer. Edit the file cmdline.txt to include a directive to hard-code an IP address. Add a space and the following directive to the end of cmdline.txt:

ip=169.254.113.200

That's it. The old procedure required a cmdline.directive, but now the Raspberry Pi boots from cmdline.txt directly. Hooray for removing redundant steps!

Ping169.254.png

Step 2: Cat5 Network Cable

Get a standard network cable and connect the laptop to the RPi. Remove the SD card from the laptop once you've modified cmdline and put it in the RPi to boot it up.

RaspberryPi Network.jpg

RaspberryPi Laptop Network.jpg

Step 3: SSH

Now you can SSH to the IP address you specified using the default username 'pi' and the default password 'raspberry':

SSH RaspberryPi.png