Connect to your Raspberry Pi with VNC

3 min readAug 3, 2020

Control your Raspberry Pi from your PC, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

VNC

Virtual Network Computing (or VNC) are software applications for remote access/control through graphical interface and used for the administration of your computer remotely. VNC is based on Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB). The RFB protocol is a client-server protocol and is described in detail in Request for Comments (RFC) 6143. The client is easy to implement and therefore can run on many different hardware.

The VNC server is installed on the computer to be controlled and receives commands from a VNC Viewer that sends various events such as header input or mouse click.

There are several VNC implementations, such as RealVNC, TigerVNC, UltraVNC. We use RealVNC. As reported in the official documentation, RealVNC is installed by default in the full Raspberry Pi OS image. You can install the RealVNC server on Raspberry Pi as the RealVNC client.

The RealVNC client must now be installed on computers that will be using the Raspberry Pi remotely. Go on RealVNC download and select the software for your operating system. For example I use Mint 64 bit and so a choice DEB X64.

Click on VNC-Viewer-x.xx.xxx-Linux-x64.deb, where the x’s are replaced by the VNC version. Install Package.

VNC Server

Now the VNC server must be configured. One way is to use the Raspberry Pi temporarily connected to a screen, with keyboard and mouse.
Select Menu →Preferences →Raspberry Pi Configuration

Go to →Interface and enable VNC:

Modem/Router

Login to your modem/router to assign a fixed address to the Raspberry Pi, so that you can connect from the VNC client with the same address. In my case I will show the procedure for a Linkem modem, but the procedure is similar in other modems/routers.

The DHCP server of the router assigned to the Raspberry Pi the IP address v4 192.168.1.128.

The router is set to always associate 192.168.1.11 to the mac address of the Raspberry Pi. Now, you need to check if the VNC Server on the Raspberry Pi can be reached at the address shown.

Note: Later I performed the same procedure to give a fixed address to the ethernet network card of Raspberry Pi. In this case the address is 192.168.1.12.