Home Assistant tests a live USB installer for mini PCs

Turning an old mini PC into a smart home hub is one of the most popular ways to run Home Assistant, but installing it has always meant a few fiddly steps: write an image to a USB stick, boot from it, then write the operating system to the internal drive. The project's new Home Assistant Installer is trying to make that simpler, and its latest pre-release adds a live USB installer for generic x86-64 PCs, as Notebookcheck noticed.

What's in alpha 4

Version 0.0.0-alpha.4 was published on 23 October on the project's GitHub releases page, clearly marked as a pre-release. Among dozens of changes, three stand out for anyone with a spare PC:

• Live USB installer for generic x86-64 machines, listed in the changelog as a proof of concept (PoC).
• A full-screen interface for that live USB installer.
• Verification of Home Assistant OS images against signed checksums, so a corrupted or tampered download should be caught before it is written.

There is a lot of polish around the dangerous part too. The warning about erasing a drive now appears once, when it is about to happen; each drive card shows its path, so two identical USB sticks can be told apart; and internal eMMC storage is kept out of the drive list on Linux (from alpha 3). The release also adds accessibility fixes, right-to-left language support and improvements to the Proxmox and UTM virtual machine flows.

Should you use it?

Not for your main system yet. The version number says it all: this is an early alpha, and the Windows build is not even signed, so SmartScreen will warn about an unknown publisher. Home Assistant has not said when the installer will be considered stable. Whatever tool you use, check the target drive twice: writing Home Assistant OS wipes it.

If you want to set up Home Assistant today, the official installation page still recommends Home Assistant OS for most people, on a Home Assistant Green, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, or an x86-64 PC. New to the platform? Our beginner's guide explains what Home Assistant is and how to get started, and our explainer on running a smart home without internet shows why a local hub is worth having. Planning to add Matter devices? Start with Matter and Thread explained.