What would it take to make a "HAOS Live" image?

Installation
1

The subject line is the tl;dr. Here’s the full story.

I’ve posted before about my battles to keep my initial HAOS install working on my RasPi3B, the main issues being 1) the repeated update failures, each consuming 1GB of unrecoverable SD space and 2) the mysterious, random reboots that left no clear cause (that I could find) in the logs. I also tried to get my RasPi to boot from a thumb drive, but even with the OTP properly configured, it refused to do so.

Then it hit me: I know every single one of my x86 platforms will gladly boot from USB. Why keep punishing my lowly RasPi, and instead give my decade-old systems that can’t run Win11 a chance to shine? Having made the RasPi thumb drive, I remade it for x86-64. I had two platforms at hand: 1) An ASUS TP500lA-FH31T flip-screen laptop with Intel Core i3-4030U dual-core processor @ 1.9 GHz and 12GB RAM, and 2) a Vulcan VTA1005XBM32 tablet with Intel Atom Z3735F quad-core processor @ 1.83 GHz and 2 (yes, TWO) GB RAM . Both systems are minimal by today’s standards, but they each easily spank a RasPi3B!

Before trying the thumb drive on one of these systems, I first made sure the hardware issues would be minimized by ensuring all essential differences would be USB peripherals. I already was using a ZBT-1 dongle for Zigbee, and I replaced the RasPi BT with a generic USB dongle. I ensured everything worked on the RasPi, then did a final backup.

The RasPi connects to the network using a wired Ethernet port (so my home router can provide full security on the interface). I wanted to try the tablet first, but it had no wired Ethernet port, and I had no USB Ethernet dongle available, so that test must wait for another day. Plus, that tablet has only a single USB 2.0 port available, meaning I’d also need a hub to support the dongles.

On to the laptop: Which worked famously! Though it runs terribly slow using the thumb drive, roughly the same speed as the RasPi3B and its SD card. The only minor glitches after restoring from backup were:

  1. Having to delete and add the Tuya integration. (I know, I know, I’m slowly replacing those devices.)

  2. Having to completely reinstall my Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition device, including having to factory reset it so it could repeat the onboarding process.

Now that HAOS on the laptop works, rather than wait and also try the tablet, I think I’ll call it good, and use the tablet as a dedicated HAOS dashboard display. Meaning the next step is to move HAOS from the thumb drive to the laptop’s boot drive. Which turns out has no single-shot solution. There are two choices:

  1. Physically disassemble the laptop, remove its drive, attach it to another system running Balena Etcher, overwrite it using the same image used for the thumb drive, then reinstall it in the laptop and reassemble the laptop. Not my favorite option.

  2. Create an Ubuntu Live USB drive, boot it, install Balena Etcher, then run it to install HAOS on the host’s drive, then repeat, again, the restore and configure process.

I believe a third option is needed: A single USB drive image that will 1) let the user run and configure HAOS from the thumb drive, then if all works well, 2) to transfer that configured and working HAOS instance from the thumb drive to the host’s drive. This could be managed via a simple menu when booting from the USB drive.

Why does this third option not already exist? The key technical issue would seem to be transferring a fully configured and working HAOS instance between media on the same system. It can’t be technically impossible, though I’m unsure how difficult it would be in practice.

Home Assistant appears to have a massive once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take creative advantage of the millions of older x86-64 platforms being abandoned by the Microsoft Win10 EOL. I think HA could see huge growth if such an easy trial/configure/deploy tool were readily available to the public, especially if it also configured a free Nabu Casa trial subscription.

For now, I’ll (sadly) keep the laptop running HAOS from the flash drive (until I find the will to repeat the bare-metal installation yet again using Ubuntu Live). It works well enough as-is, though updates and backups do take forever.

All comments are welcomed and encouraged! Not only on the “HAOS Live” question, but also on any and all parts of my own process (which is why I included all the details).

Thanks!

2

Because USB transfer on thumb drive is absolutely not appropriate for task (as you already noted, speed) it’s wholly inappropriate to run a database engine from a USB stick in almost every case because they require constant writes. Which will burn out the USB stick faster than an SD while still being an order of magnitude slower.

Nobody wants slower, rickety and likely to be corrupted.

The Ubuntu live works a treat and has a drive built in a few minutes. Restore to that works well also.

Why build an entire support structure for an install that would be ill-advised at best and possibly issue riddled because of the storage. It takes resources - which are finite. They already removed end user support from supervised installs for a similar reason.

3

It’s for evaluation purposes AND THEN, if desired, to install to the host’s hard disk, where a flash drive is the preferred method.

4

The requirements for a half decent live medium (even if you ignore a pretty GUI completely) are orthogonal and very, very different. It just doesn’t make sense to dedicate significant development efforts on something that wouldn’t even tangentially benefit the main product/ haos. Yes, haos will run from USB as well (USB SSDs are preferable, for performance reasons), I wouldn’t recommend that for longer term usage (as the USB cable is always a weak point in regards to stability/ reliability).

5

The story continues. I made a Lubuntu Live thumb drive, booted it, added Balena Etcher and the HAOS x86-64 image to it, then flashed it to the host. Got an error, which I realized was from trying to flash the .xz file rather than the image within. Doh! My old laptop is now running HAOS from it’s internal SSD, and it is SO FRIGGIN’ FAST! Really, like 20x-30x faster on things like updates.and backups. Why did nobody mention in the HA docs just how much faster this would be???!

HAOS so fast, and uses so few resources, that my totally obsolete laptop is terribly underutilized (I had forgotten the pair of cores were also hyperthreaded). So now I’m now thinking of distilling the HAOS install to a VM, then installing Proxmox and run HAOS VM there, allowing me to also run Lubuntu in a VM (to make use of the laptop screen), which can cycle through my HA dashboards as the laptop screensaver (or something).

Thoughts?

6

Hello BobCu,

That is basically What the Docs call type 2 x86 64bit install.
The difference is you run on a usb stick instead of pulling your drive out and plug it into another computer, which is what I usually do.