openHABian hassle-free openHAB Setup

I can’t remember any change to the core openHABian system in the last few weeks that would make a ZWave USB stick NOT work. @mashborn did you apply any further changes after the fresh installation?

“Startscreen” as in “no error screen”? In this case please try the usual, check the logs and restart. Can’t think of a reason why a fresh install should behave like that. HOWEVER, there are a few others: https://github.com/openhab/openhabian/issues/65

I’ll try it again.
But as far as I remember I just used the openhabian-config-tool.
Enocean-Stick in tty/devUSB0 works.

Upps, did not realize we are in the openHABian thread … :sunglasses:

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Yes. Clean install, then

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo openhabian-config (configure WiFi)

reboot

sudo apt-get install pi-bluetooth raspberrypi-sys-mods

reboot

Now l2ping works for me.

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Nope. I’ve actually posted here about it specifically - [Solved] What am I missing? OpenHABian and Bluetooth

I need to try and install the raspberrypi-sys-mods @holger.ebert used to see if that works.

Sadly I didn’t play around with Bluetooth yet. Because the openHABian base is a very minimal Raspbian, there are some differences. I hope we can find a solution that can then be included in the openHABian image by default! So please try and give me some feedback!

Just so you know: You could always just install a standard Raspbian (Lite) system and add openHABian to the mix following these few steps: http://docs.openhab.org/installation/openhabian.html#manual-setup

Thanks to Holger Ebert´s instructions I got it to work (think the raspberrypi-sys-mods did the trick, maybe it´s possible to include that one in openHABian).

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First, if I should post somewhere else please let me know. Maybe we need a separate section in the forum for openHABian?

I just put this on an RPI2 and I got it up and running with wifi. I can access the frontends and the thing discovery seems to be working. I want to test this thoroughly before I start moving all of my rules and devices over.

When I add a thing from the discovery and link it to the item that I have from a copied item file I don’t see the thing listed in any file? Should it create a thing file in the thing directory?

When I link the thing to an item should it automatically update the item file with the thing information? Or do I need to do this manually. I’ve been running 1.x for about 20 months now and I’m pretty comfortable with text files but I want to make sure I’m not doing something I don’t need to do or maybe I’m missing something.

Thanks

@DMize: Yes, this is not openHABian related, since openHABian is “only” a tool to help install OH2. Your issue has nothing to do with the installation.

Nevertheless, I can answer your questions here:

When you do a discovery through PaperUI (or Habmin), the things are stored in a json based DB. So no thing-file as you know files from OH1. At least not like they were in OH1. The json DB is also a file, but this is another story… :wink:

First thing: If you want to keep your OH1 items (and item files), you should de-activate the Simple Mode in PaperUI. Otherwise the simple mode creates items for each channel of each thing automatically. And you don’t need this as you have the items already existing in your item files.

Then you take your existing items from the item file(s) and do the link to the channel manually in your item file. You can find the channel definitions of each thing when you look at the things in PaperUI.

I think most of the OH1 user do it this way: Use PaperUI for thing discovery, then linking the channels to the items manually using item files.

You can always have a look at docs.openhab.org. There you can also find useful informations for OH1 users switching over to OH2.

I always create a tmpfs partition for the tmp and log folder.
This prevents SD wear out.

Also I create tmpfs vor var/log and the userdata folder.
This gets backed up once a day and on shutdown.

Maybe this can be included in the official image?

Thanks Stefan, I wasn’t sure if it was different in any way from the stock setup since it automates so much. I’ve reviewed the docs.openhab.org but I wasn’t finding the answer I’m looking for (maybe I missed it). I had already disabled the simple link. I will post further question in a new topic.

Thanks for your help.

Hello Dan,

There is no openHABian category. I believe there will be more questions related to openHABian rather than regarding openHABian. That’s why there is the openhabian tag (see first posting…)

I believe the information you are looking for can be found here in short: http://docs.openhab.org/configuration/index.html
and in the Migration Tutorial: http://docs.openhab.org/tutorials/migration.html

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Thanks @ThomDietrich, I read the migration page but I glanced through the configuration page and somehow I missed some of that information. I will read that through in the next few days and develop my method. Thanks for all of the hard work on openHABian. I’ll use the tag if I need to but your right most of the post will probably be related to OH. Any thoughts to add byobu or anything to the distro? I use it currently on OH 1.x to see multiple logs on different consoles. Maybe you already have something for this but I just haven’t had a chance to really dive in that deep yet.

I thought about a better way to look at logs too. There are a couple of solutions and I would like to start a discussion about these.

First, you should know that (for testing) I’ve added three aliases you can use right now. I’m personally using the first with some grc coloring.

alias openhablog='tail -n 100 -f /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log -f /var/log/openhab2/events.log'        
alias openhablog2='multitail /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log /var/log/openhab2/events.log'
alias openhablog3='multitail /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log -ci yellow -I /var/log/openhab2/events.log'

Secondly, there was a request to add frontail. I still plan that, didn’t have the time to add it yet though. https://github.com/openhab/openhabian/issues/28

Lastly, my ideal solution would be the integration of logstash and Kibana. Logstash would be the perfect solution to do context sensitive log filtering and monitoring possible. https://github.com/openhab/openhabian/issues/6 If you do not know Kibana: https://www.elastic.co/de/videos/kibana-logstash I did not yet check availability or performance requirements here.

Which solution do you feel we should pursue further? Also pinging @RHINESEL @jaydee73 @mashborn @Branden_Smale @Benjy @sihui @UglyKidJoe @James_Hiscott

Byobu is a great tool. openHABian comes with bash and screen as a good base. I had a similar discussion before regarding tmux. I personally am a big fan of zsh. In openHABian I tried to stay as simple as possible, without making the linux world even more complicated for newcomers by shipping and defaulting to a bunch of special tools. Wdyt?

Honestly, I’m the perfect candidate for OpenHabian because I don’t understand a word you posted!

I only worry about feature bloat. I’m afraid OpenHabian is becoming more of a power user system instead of what it was envisioned, a quick up and running simple installation for Linux noobs.

Add on options may be fine, but all this stuff will probably be confusing to the target user.

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I can’t agree more to what @RHINESEL wrote. I’m everything but a Linux expert. And that’s exactly why I love openHABian.

I don’t know this logging solutions you mentioned. Therefore I couldn’t give any suggestions.

Logstash and Kibana looks nice and juicy.

I would be happy to install it and keep an eye on the resource overhead (with RPi-Monitor (I’ll use that since the core system info was giving me issues )

Looking at some posts online it seems Logstash requires about a half a gig of memory so it isn’t particularly cheap. There is a cloud option, is that maybe what you had in mind?

For availability it looks like it runs on a JVM so with the Pi being an ARM processor hopefully that won’t be an issue. That and their website has a Debian installation

If it kills my installation I can always re-install easily with OpenHABian :smile:

We use logstash and kiabana for our logging system and they are VERY cool, however i wonder if they would work on a Pi already running openHAB etc. if it does work ok, then it would mega.

I still use frontail (installed manually) as most of my debugging is live so i can load this into a web browser and watch it as i create errors. I also have it as a panel in hab panel just because i can. As a result would still vote for this to be added BUT Kiabana, if workable on a Pi would also get my vote.

This page suggests that installation of kibana et al is fairly simple, I agree with others that you’d need to monitor resource usage here and if you do pursue this route it should only be an optional add-on, saving as many resources as possible for openHAB is important.