Home Assistant OS on a small PC with an AMD E350 APU?

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi,
I am completely new to Home Assistant and IoT, and to learn I want to install Home Assistant on an old FoxConn Nettop PC.
This nT-A3500 system has an AMD E350 dual core APU, an AMD A45 FCH chipset, 4 GB RAM and an 80GB SATA SSD.

I followed the steps for the “Generic x86-64” installation.
To flash the image I temporarily removed the SATA SSD and connected it to my Windows PC using a SATA-to-USB adapter.
Flashing with Balena Etcher went OK I think, including the verification phase.
However, the Nettop PC does not boot from the SSD at all. I am sure that the SSD is set as boot drive in the BIOS, so that should be OK.

Should this configuration be possible?
If not, what would be the next step I could try? I would prefer a direct installation of Home Assistant OS, but if this is not possible with my current system I could may be try the Container option with ProxMox? OR are there better options?

2

The image designed for the Intel NUC may not have kernel support for an AMD CPU.

You might be better installing a vanilla Debian image and then installing Home Assistant.

3

Thanks.
Why would that be a better option than using ProxMox?

4

Hi,
An update to my trials.
I do have another small PC with an Intel CPU. This is an Atom D525 dual core, with ICH8M chipset and 4 GB RAM.
To check it, I inserted the same 80GB SSD that I flashed with Home Assistant OS in this PC, but it does not boot at all either. So it might be that the SSD is incorrectly flashed?
Just to be clear: I connected the SSD to the internal SATA connector (I don’t want to boot through an USB connection).

So my question now is: is it possible at all to install Home Assistant OS by flashing a 2.5” SATA SSD with Balena Etcher using a SATA-to-USB adapter, and than boot from it via the SATA connector?

5

It all depends on what you want/need: the advantage to run multiple virtual machines with all the possibilities of Proxmox or not, no?

On your trials with flashing I cannot help you.

6

Thanks Nick.
OK, that’s clear.

For now I don’t intent to run multiple VMs. I just want to play with Home Assistant and learn from it.

So in that case it is easier to go through the Debian route when using this AMD E350 system?
Is, in that case, this the correct “Getting started” for installing Home Assistant on Debian? :

7

See here :

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8

I installed Debian 10 in my WYSE thin client and then installed Home Assistant using this page https://mathesonsteplock.ca/install-home-assistant-supervised-on-debian/ The installation went really well. The only hiccup was you need to do this for a fresh Debian 10 install: nano /root/.bashrc, add “export PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin” to the file, and run . /root/.bashrc

9

Thanks Francis and Greg.
I will look into these two guides, and see which will suit me best.

Still, I am also curious about this flashing of a 2.5” SATA SSD trough an SATA-to-USB adapter with Balena Etcher: should that create an Home Assistant OS image that is bootable when the SSD is connected to an internal SATA connector? Or does that create an image that has to boot through an USB connector (using the same SATA-to-USB adapter)?

10

It should. Does your PC support UEFI ? Or only bios ?

11

The AMD PC is a FoxConn Nettop nT-A3500 and the Intel PC is an ASROCK ION 3D 152B.
Both these PCs are from 2011 I think, and both PCs do not support UEFI, so only BIOS.
Does that make a difference?

12

Yes. The image requires UEFI.

13

Right!
So this must be the culprit then.
Thanks. I will give the Debian method a try.

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14

Argh!
I followed the guide “Installing Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10” successfully on the AMD E350 PC, up to the point that Debian installation was completely finished and I could remove the install media (an SD-card in my case).
But after the reboot I have the same problem again: the system will not boot from the internal SSD…
So no luck yet.
Any suggestions?

Just to be clear: the same E350 PC runs Windows flawlessly from another hard disk on the same SATA connector. So I only changed from the hard disk to the SSD.

15

Never mind, I succeeded in the end :slightly_smiling_face:
It appeared that the Debian installer did not install the GRUB bootloader the first time, probably because it found a remnant from a previous installation and assumed the system to be multi-bootable.
The next time I tried the installation it went smoothly including GRUB, and the E350 PC is booting now with Debian 10 :slightly_smiling_face:

So up to the next step now!

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16

Yes!
The next steps went flawlessly, and I now have functional installation of Home Assistant Supervised under Debian 10 on the FoxConn Nettop nT-A3500 with an AMD E350 GPU.

So now it is time to further dig in it, and see what all I can sense and automate at home :slightly_smiling_face:

I realize that this thread departed from the “Home Assistant OS” sub-forum intent, because I now am using the “Supervised” install, so I will post any possible new follow-ups in the appropriate sub-forums.

Thanks to anyone who helped me :grinning:

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17

The supervised install is basically the OS install minus the OS part. I personally prefer that because of my familiarity with UNIX and Linux.

18

But isn’t the difference also that the supervised install is in a Docker container, and the OS install is not?
So does the supervised install have (a little) more overhead?

19

Home Assistant Core is a manual installation using a Python virtual environment.
The Container install has just Home Assistant Core in a single Docker container.
The Supervised install is a series of Docker containers, including the supervisor.
The Home Assistant Operating System image has the supervised install with a custom hypervisor OS.

20

Thanks again for your help Prodigyplace!
I mistakenly understood the OS version to be a “normal” installed application in a Linux OS.
But all is clear now :slightly_smiling_face:

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