Upating a retired Vero4k+ to Bookworm

I retired one of my Vero4k’s when I switched the TV to a Vero5. Rather than tossing the Vero4k into the junk drawer, I decided to use it as my home-assistant server, rather than buying a new device for that (and moved it to the wireless network where all my IOT thingy’s live, so that HA could now discover them rather than needing to manually add the ip addresses every time)

It’s been chugging along happily running the docker-image of HA.

However, Now there are some new IOT devices using a new IOT protocol (Matter) which most of the manufactures are moving to, and I picked up a Z-Wave dongle to talk to some new z-wave swtiches I bought.

The problem is, the Docker version of HA apparently cannot work with matter, or the Z-wave device, it seems I need some kernel modules running on the host OS for that, and need to run either HAOS (which is the full OS version of HA running on the bare metal) or I need to use the “supervised” HA, which requires Bookworm running underneath.

Has anyone managed to boot up HAOS? I tried sticking it on an SD card, but the Vero does not appear to be attempting to boot it.

I’ve also tried upgrading debian to bookworm – which worked – except for updating the kernel, for which I get errors about it being unable to find the image to write it to the emmc. So I seem to be stuck running the 4.9 kernel instead of the 6.1 kernel (I suspect I’ll be unable to get the needed kernel modules to run for the Matter and z-wave devices without an updated kernel).

I’ve also tried sticking the Debian bookworm install iso on a usb stick to attempt a clean vanilla install, but cannot figure out how to get it to boot. (the Vero immediately jumps into osmc boot when powering up, none of my key press combinations seem to be giving me a boot menu)

Anyone got any suggestions?

That would not work as you would need many adaptations for it to work on the Vero.

Similar to the above topic unless you want to get yourself into kernel development for OSMC you would need to wait till @sam_nazarko officially provide the migration to bookworm.