I subscribe to a lot of Blogs for the Raspberry Pi.
The newest post that I came across was Jacob Clark’s Raspcontrol.

He’s developed a web-based control panel for headless Pis, so you can see what Pi is doing remotely without going anywhere near a sh terminal or VNC!

Installation

1. First of all, you will need to be running your Pi off of a decent sized SD card. I’d recommend 8GB+, but you can probably get away with 4GB. You’re going to be turning your Pi into a web server, so you need to install a few packages.
2. I use WiFi, but as long as your Pi is connected to your network, these instructions should work.
3. Turn your Pi on, connect a terminal to it (I use Putty) or plug a keyboard in.
4. Login as the pi user.
5. Go to the GitHub repository for Raspcontrol
6. First of all (following the installation instructions at GitHub) install Apache 2 and PHP-5:
   1. sudo apt-get install apache2
   2. sudo apt-get install php5
   3. These take a while and are quite large, hence the recommendation for a decent size SD card.
7. cd /var/www
8. sudo mkdir raspcontrol
9. cd raspcontrol
10. wget https://github.com/Bioshox/Raspcontrol/zipball/master
11. This will download the .zip file containing the Raspcontrol code. It will be called ‘master’, so you need to give it the proper extension.
12. mv master master.zip
13. unzip master.zip
14. This will give you a folder starting with Bioshox…
15. You must add the Apache user “www-data” into your sudoers file, which means they can run Superuser Commands. To do this from the shell type ‘sudo visudo’ scroll to the bottom of the file and on the last line add:
    1. www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
16. Okay, we now need to remove the master.zip file:
    1. rm master.zip
17. And move everything from the Bioshox folder into the current /var/www/raspcontrol folder.
18. (This is a pain, really, but never mind)

Let’s go a-webbing

1. On your laptop, with a browser, go to http://<the ip address of your Pi>/raspcontrol
2. You _should_ get the Raspcontrol login screen:

1. Now go to http://<ip>/raspcontrol/setup.php
2. You now get a very bare HTML form asking for a password. This is the password you will use on the login screen you saw a minute ago. So, enter a decent password and click the button. This will return you to the login screen.
3. Login using username “admin” and your password.
4. You should now see the dashboard!

Install complete!

New update
As I was writing this, I noticed a new update for Raspcontrol
So, first I did:

• cd /var/www
• mv raspcontrol raspcontrol_0.1

Then, I got the new sources from github:

• wget https://github.com/Bioshox/Raspcontrol/zipball/master
• mv master master.zip
• unzip master.zip
• mv Bioshox…. raspcontrol

This means your raspcontrol folder and URL now contains the new code and dashboard. Use the same username/password as you did the first time.

Nice GUI update, and some new bits and pieces! Good job, Jacob.