Step 1. Get all things ready to connect Raspberry Pi to laptop PC
You will need:
- A working PC duh! (internet connection is not required if you have all other things ready)
- A Raspberry Pi (Zero, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, If you have other versions do yourself a favor and buy a new one here!)
- an Ethernet cable
- SD card with Raspbian loaded on it
- Putty client for Windows (Linux use the terminal, Mac users… well get a proper PC! :))
Step 2 Get the PC ready
Open connected to internet adapter properties
Take a note what IP address will be assigned
If you wish to share your internet connection with the Raspberry Pi, you will have to be little more strict with the IP selection.My local IP is 192.168.1.7 therefore, my address will start with 192.168.xxx.xxx . Go to your internet connection adapter (WI-FI if your PC is wireless, or Ethernet if you have a second port), select properties and click on the sharing tab. Share this connection with the one that your Raspberry Pi will be using. You will see a prompt telling you what IP address will be assigned to the ethernet port. It will be something starting with 192.168.x.x (192.168.137.1 in my example)If the IP has not been automatically assigned, go to the Network and Sharing centre, then click change the adapter settings. You need to load the adapter properties and select Network Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IP). Select the manual configuration and type in the IP as follows:
IP address: 192.168.137.1 Subnet mask: 255.255.0.0
Step 3. Get the SD card ready
IMPORTANT
Please make note that on the Pixel edition of the Raspbian you have to create an empty ‘ssh’ (empty file names ssh without any extension) file in the /boot/ directory. This file has to be created each time you boot the Raspberry Pi until you enable the SSH via raspi-config. By default, the SSH server is disabled on new Raspbian images.
We need to force an IP when raspberry is loading for the first time. To do this – we will open a file on a boot partition of the card. Plug the card into the PC, open the partition and look for the cmdline.txt file. Add the following line to the cmdline.txt.
IP=192.168.137.2
Make sure not to make a new line by doing so. Keep the whole file as a single line. Save the file – and remove (a preferably safely) card from the PC. Plug it in the Raspberry Pi. Save your changes. You are ready to go.
Source: Connect Raspberry Pi to laptop PC in 4 simple steps (internet too)
