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

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

Hi,

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 11:45:57PM +0200, Christian Brædstrup wrote:
> Hey Guys,
> 
> 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).

Funny, I found this wiki page yesterday, and wrote a mail to the author,
as I didn't find anywhere on the net the source code of this, asking if he
still has the code somwhere. Got no answer yet. :)

I guess a way to have a debian web installer would be to use the
passthrough fontend module of cdebconf, which is some kind of FIFO
frontend, and like you said have a minimalistic web server (I'd say thttpd
or so rather than nginx, which is maybe overkill for this) with a CGI that
would use the FIFO interface of this frontend module to answer the
installer questions via a web interface.

But that'd suppose to have a configured network at boot, which might
accomplished with the 'ip' option pass to the kernel at boot, but then
should it be static IP or dhcp?

That's mean to hack a bit the debian installer to add a web menu at boot,
which would install a webserver .udeb.

I also saw that debconf actually already has a web interface, which is
really minimalistic, and is listening only on localhost since version
0.2.0. Maybe a way to go forward on this project might be to begin to hack
on this and enhance this web interface.

bert.