Jessie Full or Lite for intitial install?

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
1

Hi all,

First time with OpenHab, so bear with me.

(Have recently re-purposed my RPI2 from ADSB tracking, moving the ADSB to my OrangePi, so I know a little about things).

I see OH wants Raspian Jessie, and needs Java…

I’ll be running headless, so will not need the apps / GUI installed with the Full Jessie.

For a headless setup, can I install Jessie Lite, then install Java manually, or does Jessie Lite already come with all the OS bits that I’ll need?

2

What is Jessie lite? Never heard of that… :wink: Jessie without Desktop is still a full Jessie…

In Question of Raspian, you can use tasksel and deselect any graphical environment, or (if there is an option for this, I’m not aware of this) don’t install it at first place.

In Question of Java, it’s important to install Oracle Java (current version is 8u91) runtime, because openjdk has infringements regarding to openHAB. Luckily, Oracle offers jre-8u91-linux-i586.tar.gz which can be installed manually on jessie. Or you can use oracle-java8-installer to install and autoupdate it.

openHAB itself can be installed via apt-get, which should be the preferred way. See here (openHAB1) and here (openHAB2)

3

I’d recommend starting with Lite. If you apt-get install OH any missing dependencies will be installed, though I think Java is the only requirement (for core, some of the bindings may have additional requirements).

4

Thanks for that Rich,

OK - I had thought that maybe the case (Install Lite, then manually install Java), but as Im new to OH wanted to keep to a proven foundation, so installed Jessie Full.

In terms of optimisation of speed / memory etc (not too fussed about storage - OH is running on a 32gb sd), is there any benefit to scrapping it and installing on Lite, with manually added Java?

(Only got the basics in last night - can connect to the dash, home demo sitemap working, and a basic “RPI temp” sensor working - so not too much lost if any benefit).

5

If you want a stable and long running Raspberry Pi server, you will want to probably set it up to run read only on the SD card. If you search for “Read Only Raspberry” on the forum you will find several threads discussing why and how. The tl;dr is that repeated writes will wear out an SD card. So in a matter of months or a year your Pi server will crash with a corrupted SD card. Running off of a USB HD or setting it up as read only (i.e. put logs and other similar file systems into a RAM disk) will keep this from happening.

This might make you want to start over.

This is also a good time to plan a backup and development strategy. I use a personal git server and check in my changes as I go to that for backup and to keep track of changes.

I wouldn’t worry about optimizing speed and memory. There may be less RAM used or fewer services running with a Lite install but in most circumstances OH is pretty light weight.

6

I´m doing the same as you currently. And followed this howto here, which described how to install OpenHAB on Raspberry Pi running on Jessie light. But there are many others if you search for them. But for me as a beginner this was the easiest one as my debian knowledge is also limited at the moment ;-).

So far I didn´t run into any issues. But I think depending on the plugins you wish to use you might need to install some additional modules.

The reason why i picked up the light jessie version that I had a spare 3 GB SDCard here. So I could have a quick look on OpenHAB and play a little bit with it, before I setup a live environment.

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