Preparing home assistant wait too long, from China

Installation
1

Dear friends, I am a newbie and haven’t buy any hardware devices. I followed the intruction, in the home assistant official website, about how to install HAOS on virtualbox in Windows 11.

The problem I encountered is, due to the Internet Firewall issue in China, the HAOS in the virtual downloads is way too low, the speed is only like 20KB/s. Actually this happens to not only me but most of the people from mainland China. Thus I stucked at “Preparing Home Assistant - wait around 20 mins” page. However, My host computer has VPN so I can download things on GitHub at standard speed, around 5M/s. The host computer have normal access to most of the website around the world thanks to VPN.

I am wondering, if there is a way so that I can download the thing that HAOS is downloading so that I can install it offline, or is there a easy way so that I can set up the HAOS system on virtual machine to use my host computer as a proxy? Evenmore, could we choose other mirror sites in order to make the “Preparing Home Assistant - wait around 20 mins” thing for faster for different people at different places? Thank you very much.

2

It should be possible to set up your machine for internet sharing and it should lso be possible to do it over the VPN.
Once that is up, the. It is just a question about typing in the IP of the computer as the default gateway in HA.

3

Could you explain how to do it in details? Usually when setting a proxy, we need to the IP address as well as a port number. But in HA system I don’t know where to set the port number.

4

I ternet sharing in Windows is typically set up as a router, not a proxy.
Try the Windows help for internet sharing, but bewsre that this setup might open up HA for the entire internet, so you might have to look into a firewall.
I do not know if the windows firewall can be used for the internet sharing.