🛠 Installation headless : la Zero en carte réseau USB (g_ether)

Goal

Set up the Zero with no monitor, no keyboard and no network cable, using its OTG gadget mode: plugged into a laptop's USB port it enumerates as a network adapter (g_ether) plus keyboard, and you SSH in. This is the natural Zero setup — the board has no WiFi, no Bluetooth and no Ethernet at all.

Parts

• Zero + microSD with Raspberry Pi OS Lite written on it
• A real micro-USB data cable (many cheap ones are charge-only)
• A second 5 V / 1.2 A supply on the power port — the data port does not power the board

Steps

On the laptop, mount the card's FAT boot partition and add two lines:

sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt
echo "dtoverlay=dwc2" | sudo tee -a /mnt/config.txt
sudo sed -i 's/rootwait/rootwait modules-load=dwc2,g_ether/' /mnt/cmdline.txt
sudo umount /mnt

Boot the Zero, then plug its DATA micro-USB port into the laptop — it appears as usb0 / a RNDIS network adapter:

ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Check

The laptop shows a new USB network interface, ping raspberrypi.local answers and SSH drops you into a shell on the Zero.

Pitfalls

• cmdline.txt must stay a SINGLE line — a newline in that file breaks the boot.
• Forgetting the power cable: gadget mode over the data port does not feed the board.
• Windows may need a USB Ethernet (RNDIS) driver ; Linux and macOS usually just work.
• Editing the ext4 root partition instead of the small FAT boot partition where config.txt and cmdline.txt live.