I’ve been running Home Assistant on Jessie Lite for a while, using the AIO installer. A friend of my recommended DietPi so I decided to give it a go. The setup is not perfect yet, albeit fully working on 0.35.4. If you’re interested in using DietPi too, here are the steps I’ve executed:
https://github.com/ggravlingen/home-assistant/blob/master/README.md
Okay, you got my attention. I absolutely LOVE DietPi and in fact have another Pi running that as a file server. I tried installing HA on it and met with dismal failure.
When you say the set up in not perfect yet, what issues are there?
I had to run HASS as root, otherwise my zwave controller wouldn’t work. Other then that, it’s working. At least the past three days I’ve run dietpi 
Will try to fix the root issue as soon as I can.
This could get interesting. IMO, DietPi is just about the perfect Pi image to run HA on. You got all the options Diet Pi offers as far as applications you would need, its low resource so HA has plenty to run with and so. I will be watching this post for sure and if I can get my hands on another Pi before you work out the root issues, I will follow your procedure and see if I can spot anything.
I’ve read somewhere that it’s just a matter of adding the homeassistant-user to some user group that has access to the stuff in /dev. Probably a 10 second fix if you just know how Linux rights management works.
Ahhhh, okay. I will see what I can come up with then. Thanks.