[Freedombox-discuss] Introductions

[Tom Marble]

On 08/22/2010 09:32 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> On su, 2010-08-22 at 21:16 -0400, Matt Lee wrote:
>> Hey, I'm Matt Lee, campaigns manager at the Free Software Foundation and
>> [...]
>> I'd like to get started -- is there an ideal hardware device to buy for
>> this work at this point? I heard that some of the plug devices have
>> serious freedom issues, but I am little confused between the various brands.

As mentioned by Hans-Christoph, Lars and others at DebConf this
project is really about software mainly.  We really only need
any given hardware target for "show and tell".

That being said I've done some investigation into plug computers
and seems like the Sheeva models have a long-ish lead time.
There is some really interesting work in ARM based SBC's, but they
typically don't come with the convenient case and power supply, etc.
We should find one or more candidate targets, but this shouldn't
be a blocking issue.

> I have no experience with plug computers yet, but I was thinking that
> I'd start by developing things using a virtual machine. I'll be using
> KVM and i386; the image will be usable with Qemu directly, and
> convertable to something for VirtualBox, or other virtualization
> systems.

I really like Lars' approach to layering the different kinds of
services.

The one that I'm most concerned with now is leveraging the Web Of
Trust for authentication.  We worked out a straw-man for how this
could work at DebConf... and I'm still working on getting that written
up (largely inspired by MonkeySphere).  More news soon!

--Tom