Super Beginner Question

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
1

ok i am very new to most everything smart and i have two simple questions that may seem silly and they may have been covered somewhere else that i just have not located yet and if so i am sorry for asking.

Question 1. I have a raspberry Pi 3b (awesome tool) and i am currently running rasbian. Do i have to remove my sd card and install into my pc to add openhab to my pi?

Question 2. On the openhab download page i selected Raspberry pi but i dont know what the version is. Stable or Snapshot? Can some please explain the difference between the two. I really like to completely understand why and how things work instead of just saying “well it just does”

Thank You
Coy Bray

2

Welcome to the community :slight_smile:

  1. The easiest way to install openHAB on a Raspberry Pi is with the openHABian installer. openHABian will install the proper OS, openHAB and a lot of other tools/config items that would be a pain installing yourself. The general process is that you remove the SD card, put it in your PC, flash it with the openHABian image, and pop the SD card back into the Pi, connect it to your network switch/router, turn it on and wait for it to do its thing. Follow the videos on my openHAB playlist to see how that works and what the next steps to get started with openHAB would be.

  2. If you run openHABian, you won’t need to worry about downloading the software separately, but it is important to know the difference between stable/snapshot. The “Stable” version is the last major release that was fully tested and released as the “official” openHAB release. The “snapshot” version is a daily build, which is run automatically and includes all of the latest/greatest features and fixes, but is not as thoroughly tested. Generally, it’s recommended to run the stable version on your “production” openHAB environment, and only use the “snapshot” if you really need the latest fix or feature. However, recently there’s been a new development, a “Milestone” release, which is basically in between “stable” and “snapshot”. The milestone release is going to be newer than the “stable” but less likely to cause any immediate problems like an untested “snapshot” release might. In general, stable releases have been happening every 6 months or so, while Milestone releases are meant to happen ~once a month.

1 Like
3

Thank you so much. This helps more than you know.