Raspberry Pi is a fully functional computer residing on a printed circuit board less than four inches long. Designed as an educational tool, it has found widespread favor with hobbyists and professionals alike for a dazzling array of uses.
Screens supports Raspberry Pi’s pre-installed RealVNC virtual network computing server, as long as a couple of configuration settings are respected.
Configure Raspberry Pi’s RealVNC Server
- On your Raspberry Pi, boot into the desktop. If the desktop isn’t a viable option, start VNC Server from the command line.
- Navigate to Menu → Preferences → Raspberry Pi Configuration → Interfaces and confirm that VNC is enabled.
- Open VNC Server’s Options window.
- Under Security, confirm that Authentication is set to VNC Password and that Encryption is set to Prefer On.
- Under Users and Permissions, confirm that the Standard User is allowed to receive incoming connections and that a password is set for the user account.
- When setting a password, you will need to enable "Allow connections from legacy VNC Viewer users" if that option is shown.
- Double-click the VNC icon on your taskbar to open the VNC Server dialog and make a note of the IP address.
For more information about using Raspberry Pi’s on-board VNC software, see RealVNC’s guide.
Configure Raspberry Pi’s SSH Server
You will find more details here.
Making your Computer accessible remotely
If you'd like to connect to your computer remotely, we recommend to use a service such as Tailscale. You'll find instructions in this article.
Selecting a Display
In order to select a particular display on your computer, you need to specify a different port number. You'll find more details in this article.
Configure Screens
Once you are done, you can now create a new custom connection in order to connect to your Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi 5 Bookworm
As of now, Screens is unable to establish a connection with a Raspberry Pi running Bookworm. We strongly advise users to postpone any upgrades until further notice.
As a workaround, we suggest switching to X11 by following these instructions:
- Open Terminal on the Pi or connect to it via SSH.
- Execute the command:
raspi-config - Navigate to Advanced Options and then select Wayland.
- Choose X11 and confirm your selection.
- Reboot the Pi when prompted.
Additional information can be found in this article. Thank you for your understanding and patience.