Because your laptop HDMI is output only? That’s likely to be one of those things that most feel they shouldn’t even have to explain…exactly how far do you expect the level of detail to go? What is a good point at which it’s too much explanation?
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My point wasn’t that the information should have been in the documentation, but that sometimes especially for noobs there is a lot to learn and focus on and its easy to miss the simple, small or even obvious. It can be incredibly frustrating when you cant see the obvious and I cant blame people for jumping to the forum for a quick helping hand.
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I consider myself to be a NOOB with some programming skills, I do not find being referred to as a NOOB to be offensive. The world seems to be getting too politically correct.
One of my best teachers is when I try something that doesn’t work. I go back and check the work that I have done, check the documentation to see if I missed something. Check that the documentation is for the system that I am running, search for similar problems both in community.home-assistant.io and Google. If that fails I ask for help and try to write the information that will help the community provide me with an answer.
Last but not least I try to remember to say thanks (they don’t get paid for trying to help me) and help others that may have similar problems when I can.
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Thank you for Hassio. I installed it on my Ubuntu 17.10 laptop and it is flawless. Made my life easy. Fantastic piece of work. Love every piece of it.
Hi all, sorry for the NOOB question but:
Do you think is possible to run hass.io as a docker container?
At the moment I’m running several docker (1 for home assistant, 1 for mosquitto, 1 for MySQL database, 1 for influxdb and grafana, etc) in my NAS and I would love to make it simple!
There’s a lot of good points being made here about HA and ‘noobies’.
Here is my take.
I spent 25 years in the IT industry, programming for the first 15 or so in IBM mainframe assembler, Fortran, Pl/1, APL, MS Visual Basic as well as dabbling in a few others. So from a conceptual point of view I was not a noobie at all when I discovered HA. But I sure felt like one! I had no idea about Linux, Python or YAML. I didn’t even know that I wanted to automate anything in my home until I stumbled across flashing a sonoff by accident while mindlessly grazing YouTube.
My experience was that I absolutely knew I could make HA work but I don’t think I am alone in finding the use of YAML very frustrating. Also, the documentation is mostly very good but where it’s not very good at all in my opinion, is in pointing out what is possible. I said in another post, learning how to do something is not the hard bit, knowing it can be done is.
It’s been about three weeks now and I am loving it! The turning point for me was this post by @CCOSTAN Some of my favorite Home Assistant resources. I’ve never used GitHub so I needed a shove to look there for inspiration and to see what others were doing. And asking questions on here, however stupid they may be is a lifeline. There are some incredibley knowledgeable, helpful and patient people here and as I said it is not always easy to find the answer if you don’t even really know what the question is.
I think my point is that ‘we’ can go ahead and make HA more ‘accessible’ and add tweaks and features to help new people as much as we like (and we should, of course we should, why not?) but there is a definite ‘hump’ to get over when first coming to HA and that is where I think some effort should be put to stop people giving up and leaving the community soon after they join.
The HA website does a fantastic job of selling hass.io (I ‘bought’ it and I didn’t even know I wanted it!) but I don’t think it does quite as well at keeping those people.
My next task is to find out how GitHub works and what it can do. I feel like I am missing something big by not using it.
Finally, I don’t mean to offend anyone here, please don’t get angry if you don’t like what I am saying. This is just an account of my actual experience.
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For me the best thing that could happen to hass.io would be to allow sections to be reloaded even if they are in packages. I don’t know if this technically possible, easy or hard to implement but having to restart and wait a minute and a half (yeah, I know, 1st world problems…
) every time I test a change is a pain.
And referring to my previous post; for me, packages are the way to go but I didn’t even know they existed for ages and only found out by accident. They go a long way towards alleviating some of the frustrations I had, it doesn’t take long for config files even with !includes to become unmanageable. To my mind they are essential and should be flagged up in the documentation much more strongly.
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No, because as explained at the start, Hass.io is the “whole thing”. You can run Home Assistant in a Docker container though.
Thank you for your feedback!
You can, however, install it on a normal Ubuntu machine that has Docker installed. I haven’t tried it, but saw some people discussing it on one of the issues I was having: https://github.com/home-assistant/hassio/issues/227#issuecomment-371716944
That being the case, you probably could come up with a way to run it in a Docker container via something like Docker-in-Docker, but I don’t know how well it would work.
Great work, Thanks! 
Loving it, thanks a bunch
I read the newbie comments. It does say categorically in the instructions to wait for 20 minutes and that you won’t see anything on the screen while you do. Trouble is, most people think instructions shouldn’t be needed and don’t bother to read them. If so they do risk being called noobs (or worse, @Bobby_Nobble is pretty mild really). An engineer who doesn’t read documentation is particularly puzzling.
As for instructions on whether a laptop HDMI is input or output, that is NOT for HA’s docs to tell you. (i have never seen a laptop with HDMI in, but I have often thought it would be handy for headless computer troubleshooting.)
I’d like to know more as well. I want to switch back to using my NUC but the current hassio has issues with my z-wave/zibgee stick so I’m just waiting for the new OS to be ready. The only place I know to follow it is github. There’s updates almost daily, but I have no idea how close to completion it is.
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I am in complete agreement with @klogg’s post. I spent 30+ years in IT doing a very wide range of technical chores from minicomputer (dinosaur) repair, to coding in a variety of languages, to network administration. I looked for a DIY home automation system and felt HA was the way to go. The learning curve for me has been steeper than I’d hoped and expected, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel. My reply to @klogg was just to say that post resonated with me. I appreciate all the work being done by the community to stabilize HA and to help it mature. I encourage the community to be patient with people like me that are playing catch up.
Thanks @Go4wide.
Keep going and don’t throw that towel in! There is a very steep hump to get over but I think I am eventually nearing the top, or at least I can see it in the distance (it is only fair to mention and thank @anon43302295 and @petro for answering so many of my questions).
It is worth the effort.
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Follow an open source project is the best way to learn new things.
20+ years coder here.
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Being a total newbie stumbling on Home-assistant only a couple of month ago I rushed out an bought a RPi 3+, latest and greatest.
Now I have had Hassbian running with only self-induced problems ever since but I keep running into new hard challenges. Never done any programming and only been running Linus Terminal on a end-user-basis.
Since it is obvious that for guys like me HASS-IO is the future I do not want to spend too much time in Hassbian but would like to start tinkering with HASS-IO and NodeRed.
Should I rush out and buy a RPi 3 (previous model) or my actual question: Does anybody know the time-frame before the fine experts are releasing a Beta version of the complete new OS HASS-IO?
Are we talking half-years, month, weeks ?? anybody who can elaborate?
If I am going to spend loads of time learning to control this beast I might as well start with the “end-product”
Thanks a million so far, it is truly a fantastic small piece of software