Openhabian Raspberry Connect

Apps & Services openHABian
1

Hi,

I use openhabian with Rpi4 since years successfully.

I want to use the Raspberry Pi Connect service but I cant install it using this procedure : https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/services/connect.html

See error bellow :
openhabian@openhab:~ $ sudo apt install rpi-connect
[sudo] password for openhabian:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package rpi-connect

Questions :
1/ Is it possible to use this service with openhabian?
2/ How can I fix my issue

Thanks !

2

The rpi-connect docs say

Connect requires a Raspberry Pi running a 64-bit distribution of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm that uses the Wayland window server. The required OS version requires a Raspberry Pi 5, Raspberry Pi 4, or Raspberry Pi 400.

If you have the Rpi4 for years, you might have the 32-bit OS.

3

In addition to what @JensD points out, not only are you likely running 32-bit, but if it’s stock openHABian you are unlikely to be running Bookworm unless you’ve upgraded the whole OS recently and you definitely don’t have Wayland installed.

Note that installing X or Wayland is an unsupported configuration for openHABian. You can do it and it’ll likely work, but our ability to help with problems here on the forum will be significantly limited.

4

Hi,

Thank you for your fast answer !

You are totally right my os is not supported.

  • Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
  • aarch64

Best regards

5

The CPU isn’t what matters. It’s the OS that needs to be 64-bit. Until very recently openHABian recommended against installing the 64-bit OS because of lack of memory on most RPis and the fact that OH needs a lot of RAM to work.

If you want to use RPi Connect your options are:

  1. Prepare a new SD card with a stock 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm desktop image and then install OH using the apt method. Any third party software and configurations you rely on from openHABian will need to be installed and configured manually as well.

  2. Prepare a new SD card with stock 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm desktop image and then follow the manual installation instructions for openHABian. Note that it might uninstall your windowing so you might need to reinstall Wayland. This will be an unsupported deployment of openHABian. openHABian is designed and built to be a headless server, not a general purpopse desktop computer. Again, it’s not that it won’t work, we just can’t support it very well here.

In either case pay close attention to your RAM and swap usage. Wayland takes a lot of RAM and openHAB takes a lot of RAM and 64-bit Java causes openHAB to take even more.

6

I’ll try while upgrading in Pi5 !

Thank you very much for your advices !

7

or

  1. install latest openHABian (64bit version) to a fresh SD, import your config, then proceed by installing Wayland/rpi-connect/whatever manually on top.

Finally, @Cyberliner your request smells like an X-Y problem.
OH can and should be operated without local GUI but through HTTP so you don’t need neither Wayland nor rpi-connect. So first thing I’d do is rethink if you really need to get that solution going (X) or if there’s a better solution to the underlying problem (Y).
Maybe you try to explain what’s the real problem behind you’re trying to solve by installing rpi-connect?

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