I had downloaded the openhab 4 distribution from the openhab download site. Does enyone know how can i open an browser ? Is in the image a browser included ?
Thanks for your support.
Stephan
No, there is no GUI coming with openHABian.
Hmm…another distribution image with GUI would be very useful. The Conbee stick/Phoscon needs a GUI to do OTAU for zigbee firmware images. This is another stopper to me for upgrading from 3.4 to 4.
what UI can i use with this openHABian ?
An RPi is really just barely able to run OH, other services (e.g. Mosquitto, InfluxDB, etc.), and X Windows/Waylan and a window manager and a web browser. Therefore openHABian doesn’t support that. It’s expected to be run on a headless RPi (headless means no monitor, keyboard, or mouse plugged in, the only access is over the network. If you need to access the console on the machine use SSH. To access the OH user interface use a browser on another machine. To access the config files mount the samba shares to another machine.
If you want to deviate from what’s supported you have that option. You can install the full Raspberry Pi OS with desktop. Then you can either just install OH following the Linux instructions or install openHABian following the manual installation instructions and configure everything through openhabian-config.
If you do the latter, note that it will be in an unsupported configuration meaning the ability to find support on this forum may be limited.
Why can you not install OH 4 the same way you installed OH 3.4? Nothing has changed in this regard between 3.4 and 4.
Given that people are struggling to run openHABian at all on RPi 3’s and as long as an RPi 3 is supported an image that comes with X windows/Waylan is highly unlikely.
What ever is supported by the underlying operating system. Depending on the version of Raspberry Pi OS that will either be X-windows or Waylan along with the window manager of your choice. You can find lots of options and discussion on the Raspberry Pi forums.
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I started with a full GUI image long ago, successfully migrated to openhabian and OH2 and successfully later upgraded to Buster and OH3. Unfortunately all attempts I did to upgrade to Bullseye failed.
Providing a separate image with GUI won’t harm RPI3 users wo still can use the headless image.
But it will increase the load on the developers, maintainers, and supporters of openHABian. If we provide it, we have to support it and no one is volunteering to do that.
The amount of time and effort spent building openHABian scripts and the image is tiny compared to the amount of time and effort spent testing and supporting it as Raspberry Pi OS changes and helping users here on the forum.
So the developers, maintainers, and support (all volunteers) have limited what they can and will support to match the number of volunteers. And this means the chances of our creating an openHABian with UI is slim to none as that significantly increases the load (at a minimum it increases the texting by about a third).
But again, you can install a fresh Raspberry Pi OS with desktop GUI and then install openHABian on top of that. It won’t be supported but it will work.
You can also install a fresh openHABian image and install the desktop GUI yourself. Again, it won’t be supported but it will work. There are literally dozens of tutorials showing how to do it (including Upgrade Raspberry Pi OS Lite to Desktop (PIXEL, KDE, …) – RaspberryTips).
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Does that need a ‘real’ GUI or can that be done via browser and the deConz gateway web browser interface ( at least the OTAU button is there ).
In case you need a GUI ( not via browser ) it would technical be possible to run VNC ( service can be started, stopped manually to not run it by default ) stop the default deconz.service and start deconz-gui.service. Then you would be able to connect using a VNC client.
Some weeks ago I posted a tutorial How to build an openHAB 4 appliance (openHABian with touchpanel) on a Raspberry Pi 4 which might be of interest for you. To reduce the load on a RPi with openhabian + a GUI I choose openbox with just a browser available. The tutorial leads to a touchpanel with habpanel as GUI. But you can use it with keyboard/mouse, too. And instead of automatically starting a browser with just habpanel available, you can just show the openbox menu to start the browser only when needed and allow full web access in it.
Unfortunately only pairing and simple confoguration tasks can be done via the phoscon web app. The deConz GUI still requires GTK and is needed for additional services such as OTAU. In addition the graphical overview of the Zigbee mesh is pretty useful
(see example here: deCONZ - dresden elektronik)
Yes, this is the way, how my current setup is configured (on a side note HomeAssistant similiarly sets up the GUI version and includes a pre-configured VNC access in a browser window, essentially integrating the whole stuff into their dashboard, when installing the DeConz addon).
The GUI is only one of the many tasks I will face when upgrading from OH3.4 to 4.
To me a fresh image means, I have to:
- install a GUI on top of openhabian
- install OH3 and restore my OH config, run openhabian scripts to upgrade to OH4.
- backup and install and restore deCONZ and the Zigbee network configuration
- install an alternative java serial provider because nrjavaserial coming with OH is locking up connections with my smart meter reader and EnOcean dongle and not knowing if pure Javacomm will work with java 17
- backup and restore my NodeRed setup (still needed because not all channels available for Bosch devices)
- backup and restore Homebridge
- recreate and reconfigure all items in HomeKit (because a fresh homebridge install results in Apple treating this as a new bridge and dropping all previous configuration settings).
Don’t underestimate their performance. I even ran an Unifi server for some time on top of all services I mentioned above on a single RPi4 without memory problems.
A fair point, fully understood.
I guess I’ll better wait for a bookworm openhabian image, so I don’t have to do this twice.
I don’t. But also don’t underestimate the amount of RAM required by OH. This forum is littered with people running openHABian on RPi 3s with a system load above 2 and 50% swap in use because they are running too much other stuff alongside OH.
And we are not talking crazy stuff. Just running Mosquitto + InfluxDB in addition to OH is pushing a lot of users beyond that 1 GB of RAM.
Given an RPi 3 is the minimum supported hardware, that’s what openHABian has to target. I personally think we may need to move to RPi 4 as the minimum but the supply chain is still working itself out. Telling everyone they need to go get a new machine to run OH 4 is a bit too much right now. And even still, a good number of users are needing to move to RPi 4 now.
Given the limitation is RAM, I do expect OH alongside X-windows or Waylan to run comfortably on an RPi 4 with 4 GB RAM and it probably screams on an RPi 5.
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