Initially got my feet wet with a full-image install of Hassbian, and was impressed at how easily I got up and running.
Unfortunately - I have a 3.5" touch screen case for my Raspberry Pi, wanted to use it for a control panel - so I needed to go the alternative route of installing Raspbian Lite, then Home Assistant as a separate install on top of that.
I’ve spent a couple days working out some of my other details - like wifi, auto-login, the touchscreen…
And finally I’m back to getting into Home Assistant, to set things up.
First things first… install File Editor (or was it called File Manager)…
Wait, there’s nowhere to do add-ons!
Is there a File Editor add-on? How are the rest of you editing your configurations?
For example - I was going to enable some themes, but to do that I need to create a frontend.yaml.
That File Editor I added in Hassbian was nice - is there an alternative non-Hassbian one?
That solution sounds fantastic - if there was a “Supervisor” on the menu on this version.
There was one in the last install, but here’s all I have available:
Installation instructions that I followed are linked in my previous post.
Good news is I have my 3.5" touchscreen working, have wifi set up, and have the home assistant virtual environment automatically starting each re-boot, so I can use this as a server.
Bad news is - I hadn’t gotten too far previously with any Lovelace config, so I was planning on just restarting and doing all my work once I had it back up.
Hoping this can be resolved.
This - coupled with some issues I was having with my multi-router wifi in my house has made this Pi install start to become a real sore subject with the wife - so hopefully the solution isn’t another time consuming killer.
Well you did … except that’s not the method suggested for an RPi that is featured prominently in the documentation:
You chose one of the alternative methods (kind of buried in the documentation). Home Assistant Core contains none of the additional features included in Home Assistant OS (or Home Assistant Supervised).
There’s no way to upgrade Home Assistant Core to Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Supervised. Re-installation is the only choice.
At this point, you may as well just install Samba server on the RPi so you can access its files from another machine equipped with whatever text editor you want.
OK, thanks -
I’m not sure how buried or not it is - it was linked from a how-to site that I found after searching specifically for “installing Home Assistant on Raspbian”.
This is the first I’m hearing there’s additional versions - all I’ve seen discussed prior to this are the “Hassbian” that I had previously installed, and “the version that you install on top of an existing Raspbian install”. I wasn’t expecting a third version, a stripped-down version.
FWIW It’s definitely not disclaimered on that page that there’s more than one version exists, and yet there are two warning dialogs on that page. Point being - a reader (as I was) would expect that would be a key disclaimer, and the page appears to be authored to include cautions and disclaimers.
Additionally, the URL it looks like it would be the main, or even the only link for installing:
I was certainly lulled into believing I was on the right page.
With Home Assistant being open source, I am seeing this page available for edit on GitHub - would it be considered good form or poor form for me to add a disclaimer/caution/warning to the top of this page, with a link to [either the link supplied in the prior post, or a higher level page that is the real fork-in-the-road]?
I’d be glad to do that, to help others.
For my own install - I’ll think about it.
I actually had a similar thought - I’ve got it this far after a few aborted prior installs and configurations prior to this…
Part of me says “I do currently have a fully working install, with all my entities.” Really all I’m missing is a file editor, I think - but I didn’t have my old install running long enough to remember what was on the Supervisor tab, much less what’s exclusively accessible via the Supervisor tab. With Samba running on it, I could edit elsewhere. I could even just use nano to edit the files via ssh, if I need to.
…will the Lovelace editor be available in full, still? That would be the other deal breaker. I think it is, though.
The other part of me is saying “Reinstall it!” I’m partly doing this as a Linux learning project, as a 25 year IT vet who still isn’t great in Linux - the more I get my hands dirty the more I learn, the more it locks in.
Part of the marital strife I mentioned is because I’ve spent many hours getting to where I am, and I can’t fully explain to the wife why - she won’t understand the “I want to learn”, and the Lovelace panel that I’m building her is to surprise her with a control panel for lights on her sofa end table that she has out-loud wished for more than once!
If you followed the official documentation, it would have led you to installing Home Assistant OS on your Raspberry Pi.
If you followed the official documentation, that page is part of alternative installation methods. The assumption is the reader knows what they are doing if they consciously skipped the promoted installation method and chose an alternative.
If you helicoptered in via a link from another site, that other site should have cautioned the user they were about to use an alternative installation method.
There’s no indication anywhere to a reader that isn’t “the” install for Raspberry pi - including the URL itself. The page itself doesn’t communicate otherwise. There aren’t navigation (“prior page” or “parent topic”, etc) links that would also serve as clues that this is a sub-page rather than a stand-alone page.
As for the “if you followed the official documentation” remark - that’s a bit in denial of both how ‘reference documentation’ and ‘the internet’ work. Every document on the web has to be considered a potential entry point - that’s true even for a paper encyclopedia. It’s an absolute on the internet. And reference documentation - like an encyclopedia - is never meant to be read cover to cover. I suspect this documentation here even follows more of a tree-format rather than a linear sequence, making that even more unusual of an expectation to have for any user.
That would be the basis for my volunteering to add the warning - without any of those clues, any other person landing on this page would also be on a documentation island, without a reference point to navigate back into the main documentation structure, or even awareness that there are other options.
I do have confidence in this statement - I’m a veteran IT professional, former consultant. Currently a QA lead, I’m admittedly over-tuned to identifying these kind of risks… yet even I fell into it, even proactively looking for those clues.
I signed the CLA and added a note, and created a merge request using my GitHub account.
Standard approval process, I expect to see the note approved to caution future externally-linked users.
The docs are a bit of a touchy issue around here. A lot of complaints and not a whole lot of action on the part of the complainers. For the most part they are pretty good now, but I agree with you that improvements could still be made in some areas. There has always been a bit of confusion about the different installation methods. Personally, I don’t see a problem with what you are suggesting. It doesn’t hurt to try, the admins will just reject the changes. Perhaps the warning on this page should appear at the beginning of every installation method documentation?
But you weren’t quite on a documentation island. There is a getting started link at the top of the page you linked to would have taken you directly to the page you needed when you were, um, getting started!
As to your problem, honestly unless you really have the inclination and time to play linux administrator to keep your system running secure and updated, I would pooch your current install and redo it using the HASS OS install.
Personally, I prefer to spend my time having fun actually trying to figure out how to automate new things and not getting HA and everything else to just to play nice with linux.
It really doesn’t take that long now. I recently redid my installation from scratch (new SD card) and I was up and running in about an hour. As was suggested, you can install Samba to retrieve any reusable config files for the new installation.
If you truly believe that then you overlooked to include a disclaimer in each one of your own posts about “These are personal opinions and the not the opinions of the Home Assistant community”. Otherwise, according to your hypothesis, someone might be misled.
Rule of thumb: don’t parachute into docs and make assumptions; context is important.
Yet you picked the wrong installation method for your needs.
Context IS important.
Hence my comments on being able to determine it. By all appearances currently, this is not only a, but the page for install instructions for a Raspberry Pi that has Raspbian installed.
I’ve edited with the request for a very simple note at the top of this page with a simple link up one level, so that readers can establish the context of the page they are on.
I didn’t “pick the wrong installation for my need”.
That would imply an option was known.
Based on the page that I was sent to, I wasn’t aware there were options other than “Hass OS” and “HA on top of an existing Linux box”, and the only reason I knew about Hass OS was because that’s what I had installed.
If I were aware of a choice, I would have chosen differently. Choosing is an entirely different scenario.
Even though everyone responding to this thread has explained you picked the wrong installation method for supporting Add-ons, you adamantly refuse to accept responsibility for making the wrong choice. You believe everything else is to blame for your mistake.
Not at all - and there’s the problem, you are somehow caught up in “whose fault”. Now I see what the disconnect is. My anecdotal experience here - it’s not relevant. It’s simply the indicator of a symptom.
I’m pointing out that web standards exist to prevent this exact problem. These are navigation basics in web design - I’m not the first, nor will be the last. “Whose fault” is pretty petty and bad spin.
I’m pointing out that the page offered no relative navigation - right down to the URL itself.
Posting a link to yet another page that isn’t linked from that page doesn’t change that.
People WILL be sent to internal pages via external links. That’s a web design fact.
People don’t even read physical books cover-to-cover, and that’s infinitely truer for a web page. Your mechanic doesn’t read the Haynes manual cover to cover before fixing your ball joint… yet that’s what you are expecting of visitors to this site.
Web designers follow navigation standards for this very reason. These are points that are “Oh yeah” in corporate meetings, not ever met with this sort of resistance (barring technical difficulty, which is then worked through).
Righeousness and holier-than-thou “you should have _____” (which simply means "if you had known to do _____ then it wouldn’t have happened) doesn’t change the world, or even the behavior of users on this site. It doesn’t prevent a thing. It’ll happen again.
I’m offering a suggestion to minimize this issue. It’s what an IT QA guy does.
That’s it. Take it or leave it.
I’ll leave you with a forum fact that you might appreciate -
If you embrace what I suggest, you’ll have fewer topics like this appearing in the forum.
You’d actually have to go back to the 90’s to find a time where that statement was a revolutionary one.
