Today I ran into an issue when installing a new Raspberry. As I did multiple things before rebooting, I had an idea on what could have gone wrong but wasn’t sure what caused the issue so decided to start all over again and just do the minimum steps to to find the real root cause
My scenario: a fresh RaspiOS 64bit (bookworm - rel. 5.1 dec 2023) installation on a Raspberry 5, installed Openhabian-config and chose option 11 (install needed and recommended system packages). After reboot, the GUI no longer starts and the screen just shows the last lines of system log indicating that LightDM service cannot start.
It seems that the Openhabian-config has uninstalled some vital components of this service.
It is not supported to install Raspi OS yourself and openhabian on top. This option is only for non-Raspi boxes (x86 debian).
Use the image instead.
And no, there is no bookworm based image - for good reasons.
If you had read the docs more carefully you would have been aware that openHABian is a headless setup only. Means: you must not expect the GUI to work. This isn’t a supported setup either (and not a clever one, running a GUI on a a smart home server and particularly on a lowmem Raspi will be needlessly risking your system stability for no benefit).
OK, I agree that my config is not supported even though I have been running openHAB on a linux GUI based OS since a couple of years. The last year it has been running 24/7 rock solid on a Raspberry pi 4. Before that I have been testing multiple configs to reach my goal.
That’ a very short sided way of thinking, my experience the last year shows the opposite. I chose to put the effort on one stable config that combines openHAB with my personal project that historically runs as a gui (heating system at my house since 25 years) instead of managing 2 seperate OS configs (+ 2 extra rpi’s as I have always a test machine with my config to develop/test new things).
Regarding the documentation: although not recommended, it’s not excluded as well:
Then again that being said, those who insist to can use openHABian as the starting point for their ‘generic’ server and run whatever software else on top. There’s no genuine reason why this wouldn’t work
I appreciate the work of all collaborators of openHAB : you all did a great job on building a flexible but stable smarthome platform and a helpful community. Sorry if I gave you the impression that I wanted your help, I just wanted to share my findings. I guess it’s cumbersome to document each of the openhabian-config options, but if you could send the url to the source code it would help me a lot to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.
Just one last thing: if I just wanted a smarthome platform that doesn’t allow any configuration flexibility I would have chosen for Home Assistant.
it’s all public:
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