Episode: 4125
Title: HPR4125: Installing Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS), on a x86-64 machine
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4125/hpr4125.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:53:44

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4125 for Friday the 24th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Installing Home Assistant Operating System HAOS on X8664
Machine.
It is part of the series' home automation.
It is hosted by Ken Fallon, and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Method 1 installing HAOS via Ubuntu booting from a USB flash drive.
To a generic X8664 PC.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
Today is going to be the second in our series about home automation.
The first being HPR4099 introducing home automation.
And we were talking about home assistant today.
We are going to install home assistant for you.
And we're going to do that live basically.
Let's see how we're going to do that.
On the home assistant installation page, there are various different options available
for you to install home assistant.
And again, home assistant is your central hub.
It's the one that's going to do the brains behind all your automations.
It's going to take in information from sensors and do things with us as you desire.
So the easiest, by far the easiest way to guess, up and running with a home assistant hub
is to buy the home assistant green product, which is produced by the project.
And it's a hardware device and it's pretty much guaranteed to run.
The next option would be a DIY using a Raspberry Pi, which I intend to do an episode on
as well.
And then the next level would be with the home assistant yellow, which again is a compute
module based on the Raspberry Pi and is produced in conjunction with the home assistant community.
So we will not be installing it on an old droid device, but we will in fact be installing
us on X8664 machine using this expert method here.
And then there's expert methods, which we may or may not get to in the series if you want
to send a show using that.
That's absolutely fine.
We'll probably stick to these methods here to get us up and running initially.
As I said, I'm no home assistant expert.
I'm just getting into it and this is me documenting my journey, so to speak.
So I'm going to be installing it on a HP T610 flexible thin client.
And the reason I'm doing that is because I have one of them.
And it is the only available X86 clients that I have right at this moment in time.
So therefore, that's the one we're going to use.
It's a bit finicky, I got them during the lockdown when there was a shortage of Raspberry
Pi 4s and had a few things that I needed to do specifically.
I need to drive to printers and the printer definition files and all the stuff is only
available on i386 platform, so therefore that's why I got those.
They're kind of the same equivalent power as a Raspberry Pi 4, a little bit under.
But I have been able to upgrade the memory into 16 gigabytes and there's 16 gigabytes
on board flash as well and there's also space to attach an IDE drive which I haven't
bothered doing because 16 gigs is more than enough.
I'll include a link to information about the hardware and just want to reinforce the fact
that I do not recommend this hardware for you.
Because when I was doing this, the UEFI boot setup of this computer is out of date with
the majority of the modern distros, so as a result you need to disable that before anything
else.
So when you want to install Home Assistant, you click on the tutorial and you get brought
to the Home Assistant install page which is the generic-x8664 page and the first thing
they tell you to do as well is you need to disable UEFI boot because they do not support
it.
It becomes an internet appliance and they give you some examples there in the documentation
about how to do that.
Then they go on to say how to install Home Assistant OS or HAOS as the abbreviation they
use on your x86 hardware and they provide two methods.
So the first method is the one we're going to be covering but I just want to explain
the other method which is option 2.
An option 2 is to open up, turn off your target PC where you're going to be installing Home
Assistant on.
Take out the hard drive physically, put it into a USB caddy device or something and attach
it to your laptop or PC and basically flash it as you would an SD card if you were trying
to burn Raspberry Pi.
You put in use etcher or something like that or DD even and you simply burn the image
onto the disk so Home Assistant OS itself doesn't come with any way to install so it doesn't
have an installer program.
So what it suggests is doing it that way and then when you have it burned the image you
take on mounted of course from your current system, take out the disk, reinstall it again
and turn it back on and then it will boot into the appliance and you will get a web page.
And we're only going to take you as far as getting the web page today and then we will
go on to the next episode so sit in your expectations right there.
So the first thing that I'll do is I'll read the instructions which is always good.
So method one you have a target computer so you install the USB flash drive.
So what I want you to do here is they are asking you to install via a live Linux distro
and the one they select is Ubuntu.
So you download an image for Ubuntu live, you burn it, use an etcher, bletcher or DD
or something or Fedora media writer whatever works for you onto a USB stick.
I've got a 64 gig one here and then you turn off your target computer once you finish
burning it.
Same way you will do an SD card for a Raspberry Pi again and then you will turn off your
target computer booties of the USB stick.
Once it's booted off the USB stick you then go to the web page to download the image.
So you're running inside the live environment, be that Ubuntu, be that Fedora, be a Debian,
Debian is the one that I actually used because for some reason Wayland I think didn't run
and the only thing I could get working was a Debian machine.
So strange the word maybe, Debian it was for the win and I clicked on the link to download
the image so inside your live environment you go to the Home Assistant page again, you
go to installation generic x86-64 and then step 5 of method 1 has download the image which
is github.com Home Assistant operating system releases download 12.2 HOS on score generic
dash x86-64-12-2.img.xz Now by the time you're listening to this that may have moved
on so you pick the latest image and once it's downloaded under Ubuntu at the bottom left
you can go disks and then there's a section 3 dots where you can restore disk image so you
would highlight the disk that you want to install it on so you know your main slash dev slash
whatever and then you would select the image that you want and then you start restoring and it
will confirm that it's restored and then you would reboot the image and that is pretty much
that how I did it on the Ubuntu or on the Debian image myself was I installed the USB stick
turned on the computer booted to a live environment and then I actually opened up a terminal
and I installed open SSH dash server started the server found my IP address and secured
shell from my own PC into that server because keyboard and my PC here is a lot better than that one
then I installed wget and then I used wget to pull down the image and once I had the image
installed I used LSBLK to tell me what the file systems were and in my case I ignored the ones
that had loop zero because that's where the file system is mounted and I also ignored a slash
live slash mount anything with live in it which happened to be SDB and that left only SDA1 which
was 16 gig which matched what was in the BIOS and then I just used the DD device where I used the
IF which is the infile pointing to the h a o s generic image dot x z space o f equals 4 slash dev
4 slash s da and that took a while to do and it rolled 319 megabytes of data and when I was done
I rebooted the system and by the big I was able to connect to that IP address on port 8123
and that is it that is how you install home assistant as a device on an x86 computer
tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio
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