My daughter got a Pi for Christmas. I have no HDMI monitor or TV available at the moment. Until we get one is there any way to use the Pi?

I have researched and tried various approaches to the headless setup. At one point I got it working by pluging the Pi into my router and finding it's IP address in the router admin, and from there logging in with PuTTY — but then I attempted to get in directly via ethernet from my laptop and to cut a long story short some file I changed in that procedure must have ended up locking me out and I have been unable to log in by any method since.

Since then I've wiped the SD card and tried installing Noobs and Raspian and using silentinstall but I really don't have a clue about Pi as of yet and some of the comments I've read on this stack exchange site have led me to believe that what I'm after is actually impossible. Is that the case and if so then why was I able to log in originally.

What I need to do is to get the Pi working without a HDMI monitor. Can I do this and if so what route should I proceed with? By "what route" I mean Raspbian vs NOOBS or Ethernet vs WI-FI vs serial TTL. I'm open to trying any setup strategy but for now ideally it would the simplest way of doing it.

My daughter got a Pi for Christmas. I have no HDMI monitor or TV available at the moment. Until we get one is there any way to use the Pi?

I have researched and tried various approaches to the headless setup. At one point I got it working by pluging the Pi into my router and finding it's IP address in the router admin, and from there logging in with PuTTY — but then I attempted to get in directly via ethernet from my laptop and to cut a long story short some file I changed in that procedure must have ended up locking me out and I have been unable to log in by any method since.

Since then I've wiped the SD card and tried installing Noobs and Raspian and using silentinstall but I really don't have a clue about Pi as of yet and some of the comments I've read on this stack exchange site have led me to believe that what I'm after is actually impossible. Is that the case and if so then why was I able to log in originally.

What I need to do is to get the Pi working without a HDMI monitor. Can I do this and if so what route should I proceed with? By "what route" I mean Raspbian vs NOOBS or Ethernet vs WI-FI vs serial TTL. I'm open to trying any setup strategy but for now ideally it would the simplest way of doing it.

My daughter got a PI for christmas. I have no HDMI monitor or TV available at the moment. Until we get one is there any way to use the PI?

I have researched and tried various approaches to the headless setup. At one point I got it working by pluging the PI into my router and finding it's IP address in the router admin, and from there logging in with Putty — but then I attempted to get in directly via ethernet from my laptop and to cut a long story short some file I changed in that procedure must have ended up locking me out and I have been unable to log in by any method since.

Since then I've wiped the SD card and tried installing Noobs and Raspian and using silentinstall but I really don't have a clue about PI as of yet and some of the comments I've read on this stack exchange site have led me to believe that what I'm after is actually impossible. Is that the case and if so then why was I able to log in originally.

What I need to do is to get the PI working without a HDMI monitor. Can I do this and if so what route should I proceed with? By "what route" I mean Raspian vs NOOBS or ethernet vs WIFI vs serial TTL. I'm open to trying any setup strategy but for now ideally it would the simplest way of doing it.

My daughter got a Pi for Christmas. I have no HDMI monitor or TV available at the moment. Until we get one is there any way to use the Pi?

I have researched and tried various approaches to the headless setup. At one point I got it working by pluging the Pi into my router and finding it's IP address in the router admin, and from there logging in with PuTTY — but then I attempted to get in directly via ethernet from my laptop and to cut a long story short some file I changed in that procedure must have ended up locking me out and I have been unable to log in by any method since.

Since then I've wiped the SD card and tried installing Noobs and Raspian and using silentinstall but I really don't have a clue about Pi as of yet and some of the comments I've read on this stack exchange site have led me to believe that what I'm after is actually impossible. Is that the case and if so then why was I able to log in originally.

What I need to do is to get the Pi working without a HDMI monitor. Can I do this and if so what route should I proceed with? By "what route" I mean Raspbian vs NOOBS or Ethernet vs WI-FI vs serial TTL. I'm open to trying any setup strategy but for now ideally it would the simplest way of doing it.