The excellent Raspberry Pi documenation contains a thorough description of the various methods of installing operating system images. Raspbian Lite is a stripped-down version of the OS, and without the need for a graphical user interface, it’s less than half of the size of the desktop image. Since I’ll be using the Pi Zero in headless mode, accessing it only from a remote computer, there’s no need to install the complete desktop version. Raspbian is a derivative of the Debian Linux distrubution, and is the standard operating system for all the Raspberry Pi boards.

You’ll also need some type of SD card reader or hub attached to your computer in order to write the Raspbian OS to the SD card. Although you can buy everything “a la carte,” so to speak, it often makes sense to just buy a starter kit from a place like, Adafruit, SparkFun, and others which will include everything you’re likely to need. Here is the list of hardware I used to get started.

What follows is my step-by-step process for getting a Pi Zero up and running out of the box in headless mode, using a Linux (or Mac) computer as the remote terminal for communicating with and configuring the Pi. All access to the module is via Secure Shell ( SSH) from a remote terminal. Now, while the Pi Zero board does have a Mini HDMI port and Micro USB ports for power and peripheral devices, it is ideally used in a “headless” mode, with nothing connected to it except the power cable. This makes it great for use in embedded projects. It has the same 40-pin GPIO pinout as the full-featured Raspberry Pi 4, but without the male headers soldered onto the board. The Raspberry Pi Zero W is the smallest standalone RPi board, and includes built-in WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.

Raspberry pi zero wifi configuration