I am a user of Home Assistant Green, which I purchased from your official website on November 15, 2024. The device comes with Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as the default operating system. During my usage, I found that the SSH commands in HAOS are incomplete, which affects some of my needs. Therefore, I would like to switch the operating system from HAOS to Raspberry Pi OS.
I have tried the following steps but encountered issues:
Using balenaEtcher to flash the official Home Assistant OS image:
I successfully used balenaEtcher to write the Home Assistant OS image to an SD card, and the Home Assistant Green booted successfully from the SD card.
Attempting to flash the Raspberry Pi OS with desktop (64-bit) system image:
I used balenaEtcher to flash the Raspberry Pi OS with desktop (64-bit) system image to an SD card.
However, when I inserted the SD card and started the Home Assistant Green, the device still booted into the HAOS system instead of booting from the SD card with Raspberry Pi OS.
Due to this issue, I am currently unable to successfully switch the operating system from HAOS to Raspberry Pi OS. I kindly request your assistance to guide me on how to correctly perform this switch. Specifically, I need help with the following questions:
How can I ensure that the Home Assistant Green boots from the SD card instead of the internal eMMC storage?
Are there any additional configurations or settings required to disable eMMC booting?
Are there other tools or methods that can better facilitate this switching process?
I have tried many SSH commands, but often I receive messages indicating that the commands are not available in the HAOS system’s SSH, making it difficult to operate. Thank you.
That still didn’t tell us what you are trying to do with SSH. It is tricky with HAOS due to users mostly. But is it relatively easy to send SSH commands to other devices,. I cant see why you would want to send SSH commands to HA.
Or core. But you’re on to it… Then to do anything else they’ll need docker. Green just simply wasn’t designed for this.
Op if that’s what you want green may not be the right device. Think of it as an appliance not a general purpose PC running Linux.
If you actually need certain commands not provided then. Hey go build a box but it’s probably not going to be on the green. That’s purpose built to run HAOS. Thus why everyone is asking what YOU ACTUALLY need. Many MANY folks start with an assumption without considering other ways to do a thing. - And end up off in the weeds for it like maybe trying to install a different os on a device not designed for it - not knowing someone already solved that problem. (it’s called the x/y problem)
Thank you for your reply and suggestions! I now understand the limitations of the Home Assistant Green as a purpose-built device, designed to run Home Assistant OS (HAOS) rather than a general-purpose OS like Raspberry Pi OS. I will reconsider my needs and explore whether I can achieve the functionality I require using Docker or other tools within HAOS, or if I should consider a more suitable hardware solution. Thanks again for your thoughtful response!
Sorry to bring this back to life but being able to “do what I want with my hardware” is the main reason I use HA in the first place, so this feels a bit ironic.
I understand that there might be limitations, but is there really no way to use the green’s hardware without HAOS? I would want to host more services in it since my HA install is quite simple and the whole read-only-supervisor model while great for HA, is a bit of a pain to tinker with.
Is it just hard-wired to look for HAOS in the SD card?
Why don’t you tell us what you want to do, that way someone would be able to help. It really is no good just saying it doesn’t work. Because chances are your not the first to try it. More importantly someone has probably worked out how to do it.
Raspberry OS is tied to broadcom processors. If you are proficient in building Linux distributions, you could probably take the Green kernel from HAOS and build a Debian distribution on top of it. Possible, but not for faint hearted.
Sorry I might not have been explicit enough.
Things like nextcloud, bit/vaultwarden, searx or simply a local git server. Those are the kind of services I would want to host in the green’s hardware.
I’m aware there might be addons for some of these but since I’m already familiar with hosting these services I’d rather not add more layers to the mix. Plus, I would prefer these things not to depend on HA.
To be even more specific, since these are not the only things I host/infrastructure I manage, I’m quite accustomed to software like Ansible to handle deployments/configs. But after fiddling around with the host OS and realizing the read-only model, I’m guessing that these kind of solutions would not really work or might mess with the OS in unexpected ways.
I understand that those things can be deployed using docker, but something like setting up a cronjob to handle updates/backups doesn’t seem doable, since cron is not installed and there’s no way (I can find) to install packages.
I’m not trying to say it doesn’t work. It does, and it works great. What does not seem to work is flashing pi os in the ssd/a usb stick and rebooting the device, since it still boots into HA.
That or I’m just doing something super silly here, which in fairness might be the case since I havent really messed around with these kind of devices before (both green and pi stuff).
Damn, I cannot install HAOS on my SmartThings Hub…
Grr, why does my Google Home Speaker cannot be flashed with Amazon Alexa?
I guess it is hard to understand, the Green is a purpose built device. It is meant to run HAOS for people who do not want to worry about anything, but use Home Assistant.
Luckily that is build around a linux kernel so if someone is willing it should be no problem creating linux distro like debian or armbian that runs on the HA Green.
Support for the RK3566 SOC itself was added to mainline long time ago:
