Newcommers Confusions

1

Hi

I’m new to Home Automation in General.
I’m New to Home Assistant in the way that I tried to install it in Virtualbox to get an idea of this Software, And I failed so far.
However my failure got me thinking.
I noticed that there are different ways to install Home Assistant and I would like to know really what the difference is ?. More specifically what is the best way to install when you have a Windows 10 standing as a Server already.

As well as introduce my self to you all.
I’m a Software Developer so I’m used to having to tinker with my things to make it work the way I want it which is specifically why my current choice is to try Home assistant out.

Also the problem I ran in to is best shown with where I am stuck ATM.

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Basically I have no idea what to do from here on forward.
I’ve got a little Ubuntu, Red Hat and Linux from Scratch experience.
but must confess my primary system have always been Windows.

I wasn’t sure which category to put this one in so if I’m in the wrong one please point me in the right direction.

2

What have you tried? I successfully ran in VirtualBox when I first evaluated HA. I had the NIC in bridged mode to get a network address. I tend to like Debian because the server itself does not need the overhead of a graphical environment.

Home Assistant itself is a Python application. It can either be installed in a Python venv or there is a Docker installation.

Hassbian is a Raspian based venv image of Home Assistant. The Hassbian scripts help with common tasks.

Hass.io unfortunately means 2 different things.

  1. It is a set of 2 Docker containers that make an extensible user-friendly system. The addons are separate Docker containers.

  2. A prebuilt image of Hass.io using their custom HassOs hypervisor based on buildroot.

I avoid the prebuilt image due to network issues.

3

I went to this page.

and first Tried the VDI. afterwards I tried the WMDK

I’ve got the setup as bridge mode in my Nic and I’ve enabled efi bios.

4

Install Debian or Ubuntu on a VM & try the instructions further down the page here.

I usually install Samba too & set up a share from /usr/share/hassio to access the configuration files remotely.

5

Thanks I will try that.

but What I also hear you say is I should switch out my windows 10 for a linux server instead as I would be able to run this directly through docker on a linux server.

makes me thinking is it also possible to run directly from docker on a windows 10 machine ?

6

Install Ubuntu or Debian in a VirtualBox VM & then install Hassio. I ran it that way for a while until I purchased a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for Home Assistant. I ran Hassio on Raspbian Lite for a while but an currently running an older (0.90.2) version of Home Assistant in a venv.

Installation on Windows is not officially supported and you could have other issues.

Development is very quick, with full releases every 2-3 weeks, usually with bugs & breaking changes. There are 2 full-time developers, 1 on Home Assistant & 1 on Hassio. I moved back from 0.92.2 to 0.90.2 to get a stable build that works for me until things settle down a bit.

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