I have been running home assistant on a generic Linux virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox system for several years. It has worked pretty well for me, but I recently decided to purchase a mini pc and move home assistant to it.
In part what prompted this was finding a low cost mini PC that looked pretty good. $139.00 for an OUVISLITE Ιntel Celeron J4125 (Up to 2.7GHz), with 8GB DDR4 128GB M.2 SSD Mini Computer, 4K HDMI, Triple Display, Dual WiFi, BT4.2, and HTPC. For that price I figured “what the hell, let’s give it a try”.
Getting ready.
Create a bootable USB drive with Linux. I started by downloading Etcher to my PC from https://etcherofficial.com/download/
After downloading I ran etcher, pointed the source to a Zorin Linux ISO image and the target to a 4GB flash drive. Now I had a bootable USB drive. With a USB bootable drive I was ready to start following the instructions at https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/generic-x86-64 (using Zorin Linux instead of Ubuntu). But first I had to buy and setup the hardware.
Setting up the hardware.
I bought an OUVISLITE mini-pc. I had never heard of the brand, but the Amazon ratings were good, and the price was low, $139.00 on sale. The specs:
Mini PC Window 11 Pro with Ιntel Celeron J4125 (Up to 2.7GHz), 8GB DDR4 128GB M.2 SSD Mini Computer Small Desktop PC Support 2TB 2.5”SSD/HDD, Win10, 4K HDMI, Triple Display, Dual WiFi, BT4.2, HTPC
Unboxing.
Surprisingly the box was delivered to my house, not in an Amazon shipping box, but in the actual product box.
Setup
Setup was a breeze. I plugged in a USB keyboard and mouse, connected the HDMI cable to my TV, plugged the power and and booted right up to the Windows 11 setup screen. That showed me that the computer was fine.
I rebooted to the BIOS setup screen by pressing the F2 function key during power on. I then changed the device boot order so that the first device looked at was the USB. Plugged the USB flash drive with Zorin linux installed and booted right into it.
Then with the system booted to linux, I connected to my wifi and downloaded Etcher. All I had to do then was follow the instructions at https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/generic-x86-64#write-the-image-to-your-boot-media, starting at
Etcher warned me that I was going to overwrite the existing system (Windows 11), but that is what I wanted, so I finished the instructions and now I have HAOS on the PC.
Setting up Home Assistant
The last step was to restore my old Home Assistant to the new hardware. This step was very easy as well. I use the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on so I had full backups of my old system in the Google drive. I downloaded the backup to one of my regular PCs.
I booted the mini PC up and connected to it from another PC using a web browser and the URL http://homeassistant.local:8123. I then navigated to the backup screen (Settings-> System-> Backup), clicked on the three dots menu to download the backup and then did a restore. And voila, my old system is now running on dedicated hardware.
Last Steps
The last few steps I had to do were setting up a dedicated IP address and resetting the Backup system. Other than that, everthing else seems to be working.