This is a simple step. While the Odroid can be started headless and is ready for ssh on first boot I like to have the Desktop up for a few early changes. So plug in the eMMC or SD card, monitor, usb dongle for keyboard and mouse, ethernet cable and finally power.

*I will note here that it is not wise to plug in a blank SD card at this point. I had thought since I have an eMMC card that I would use a high capacity card as a drive. Before this can happen you have to do a little drive priority maintenance. It will not boot up the eMMC drive with an SD card in. I will not be covering that in this tutorial. I may come back to this in the future as an update.

If you have to enter a password or user they are as follows

User = odroid

Password = odroid

The Odroid boots fast and boots into the desktop immediately. The first think I do is run the odroid utility which seems to be Odroids version of the raspi-config command on Raspberry Pi. It is not very robust but I usually choose to change the hostname. We will not for this tutorial because we are just setting up a development web server and not covering network security. Aside from changing host name we will also expand the root partition and get some updated xorg files for the desktop. If we were sticking with the desktop we would also change the windows manager but since we are not we will skip that part. When you are finished with this step you can reboot so that changes will take effect.

On reboot we will then start a terminal so we can check a few things and make a few short changes.

First run the command

sudo ifconfig

we can check our internet connection. We are mainly looking for eth0 and what the IP address is. We may need some of the other parameters but we can check them later. Make a note of your IP address.

next enter the command

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

This command will let us choose our keyboard for our configuration. Choose the UTF8 configuration for your country. Use the spacebar to deselect the default and to select the keyboard configuration of your choosing.

next we will enter the command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

This command is so that we can choose our own timezone. This is pretty self explanatory.

Next we will run the command line:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd.conf

This will bring up the nano editor so you can make changes to the script. In my image I have found that nano is not installed you can switch nano for the vicommand if you are comfortable with the vi editor. If the nano editor is not there then run the command line:

sudo apt-get install nano

Then rerun the command line:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd.conf

scroll down till you see the lines

port# = 22 (make sure this is set to 22 for our initial setup but for security you can change the port later)

protocol 2 (I am not sure what this is but it is supposed to be on 2)

permit root login = YES (make sure this is yes for now but again for security you will want to change this to NO later)

Hit Ctrl X then y then enter to exit and save the file.

Let's bind the IP address by the following commands:

ifdown eth0

ifup eth0

Make note of the IP Address

In the command line type:

sudo reboot