Home Assistant installation failure on Ubuntu Server 16.04: Cryptography error

I need guidance to resolve an installation error that is probably caused by a missing dependency or possibly python version (rookie guess) .

I’ve already successfully installed Home Assistant on an old PC running Lubuntu 18.04 32-bit. I used the python virtual environment technique and it’s been running fine (currently running 0.80.0).

I recently attempted to install Home Assistant on a second, identical PC equipped with Ubuntu Server 16.04 32-bit. The installation (0.82.0) fails shortly after it starts something called egg_info that’s part of the cryptography setup (specifically openssl).

I’m not using ssh so the best I can do is provide a literal screenshot of the monitor. I’ve marked up the screenshot to point out the warnings and the final error message.

I’ve tried the installation three times (erasing/recreating the directory and virtual environment each time) and even tried installing an older version of Home Assistant (pip3 install homeassistant==0.80.0) but it always fails at the same point (so probably not related to Home Assistant’s version).

I didn’t encounter this error when I installed on Lubuntu 18.04 32-bit so there’s something missing and/or different with Ubuntu Server 16.04 32-bit (the hardware is identical). One thing I do know that’s different is python 3.6 is on Lubuntu 18.04 whereas it’s python 3.5 on Ubuntu Server 16.04. Is this the source of the problem or is it something else?

… crickets …

Looks like this is a unique problem and no one else has encountered it.

I have no idea why Home Assistant’s installer is unhappy with this instance of Ubuntu Server 16.04 32-bit so I wiped it out and installed a minimal version of Ubuntu 18.04 32-bit using the Netboot image for i386. Now Home Assistant’s installer flies through the installation process without complaint.