Installing HA on a computer what OS

I have a PC with windows10 installed on it and want to move HA from my PI 3 on to it. I can dual boot the machine and would like to install HASS.io, what OS is preferred for this Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server or Debian. Thanks for any input

Debian server IMHO. But you wonā€™t want to dual boot as youā€™ll want home assistant on 24/7.

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mineā€™s running on a headless debian server too.

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Does headless just mean itā€™s command line only and no GUI?

@ramdisk Ubuntu and Ubuntu server are more or less the same thing, just different packages installed. I found Ubuntu very easy to setup as a virtualbox on my windows 10 pc. I will eventually be migrating from a pi to windows 10, with Ubuntu in a virtual box and hassio in docker.

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yup, donā€™t really need a gui

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what install process did you guys use?

I installed it on Ubuntu, which runs on my Hyper-V server. Works fine for me, though I have to mention that it runs with 4096MB of RAM and 6 cores set up in the VM. It ran with a lot less though, but I prefer high performance for something as trivial al Home Assistant.

Iā€™m going to run it on a laptop pc 8GB ram i3 Intel. Last night I tried to install Debian 9 and dual boot it wth windows 10. Something is not right with the Debian install becaude I canā€™t excite any sudo commands. So back to the drawing board

For my install of HassIO on ubuntu (works on any Generic Ubuntu/Debian machine) I used the instructions from Frenckā€™s gist:

May I ask why you would dual boot it? I mean Home Assistant is something youā€™d want to run 24/7. My advice would be using a dedicated device just for HA. Not only will it be much more stable if youā€™d run HA exclusively on that device, but also the chance of getting errors from other software will be minimal.

Imagine Home Assistant using several ports that other software might use as well. They wonā€™t work well then. (This is a problem when installing HA on Windows for example where youā€™d need to remap ports to stop the conflicts).

That is perfectly normal for debian, it doesnā€™t have sudo by default. You can either do things as root, or you can install sudo. A simple google search would have found this out.

I was only going to use HA and never dual boot. Can I just install Debian or Ubuntu over the windows if its not a generic machine?

I have been reading and searching for sudo commands, not easy to figure out coming from a window user. I think Iā€™m going to try to re-install Debian or follow Frenckā€™s.
When I install Debian I set up a root user and couldnā€™t load sudoā€¦something may have gone wrong durning the install, Iā€™ll try re-installing

Thanks everyone for all your input it is most appreciated

You can do whatever you want to replace an OS on a computer you own. What do you mean ā€œnot a generic machineā€?

You didnā€™t do anything wrong during the install. Debian doesnā€™t COME WITH sudo by default. You either need to install sudo or use root, as @nickrout was saying.

If youā€™d rather do things with sudo, you can get it with

apt-get install sudo

by the way (but you will need to be logged in as root to run that initially).

Youā€™ll also need to make sure your normal user account is in the list of those allowed to use sudo. In Debian, putting the user into the ā€˜sudoā€™ group is generally sufficient, so again, as root:

adduser <your_username> sudo

Then log out and back in again.

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And if you really donā€™t feel comfortable with all that, install ubuntu which has sudo already and then create a virtual environment.

If you want Hassio though you will need docker, though there is nothing Hassio can do that Home Assistant canā€™t.

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Debian stretch here, in a Celeron J1900 that also runs TimeMachine and DLNA services, only i had to reload all the plugins starting from a Raspberry snapshot. now Iā€™m focusing on SSH and Samba

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I did a su command to get to root the login as root, next I issued the command apt-get install sudo

I get this message

Package sudo is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available form another source

Iā€™ve been scearching the web for a fix, but no luck so far

Thatā€™s pretty odd. Exactly what did you type to install sudo?

This article looks pretty right

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The problem is that if you enter a password for root, sudo is not installed and you have to enter the password every time you issue a sudo command.

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