[Freedombox-discuss] [Freedom Box] Finding your FB box on the network

[Christian Brædstrup]

Hey Guys,

I have been hacking on the Debian live system the last couple of days and
have something working I wanted to share. I have written a couple of Perl
script to help computers on the LAN find the FB box. One is a primitive
broadcast server running on the box and the other is a client you start on
your local machine that grabs the packages from the server and opens Firefox
to point at the box. Everything runs of a Debian live system and is build
with nginx webserver.
My hope is to hack some Perl CGI to handle interaction with the user on the
web interface and then use debootstrap to install the system. I have been
looking at the debootstrap system and I think it should be possible with a
dynamical shell script written by Perl with the user info (Well it is
possible because someone has done it before but his repo is gone:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/WebInstaller). It is really simple to
build the live system and the scripts just plugs right in (On my system
anyway).

It still isn't perfect ex. the script runs for 120 sec on boot and shutdown
(Haven't found a way only to run it on boot and only when it is needed) but
it works. Also it can only handle eth0 but I should be able to fix that with
time.

I'm not a Perl programmer and am in a learning phase so if someone on the
list is good at Perl and CGI the web interface will get build faster and I
can look into building a shell script for the debootstrap in the meanwhile.
I purpose we open the repo at alioth and use git to handle releases like
this. Then I will upload the scripts to that repo and post updates when I
have them.

This is still a pre-alpha so it may not work but if you want to test the
system (and I hope you will) all you do is:

* Install live-helper

apt-get install live-helper

* Run the lh_config script

lh_config -b iso -a i386 --packages "nginx"

* untar the FB-Live.tar file to the new config directory

tar FB-script.tar

* Build the system

lh_build

when it is done you should have a ISO that you can burn to a CD or put on a
usb stick with UNetbootin. If you fix any errors in the scripts you can send
them to the list or wait to a repo is up and running.

Cheers,
Christian
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