[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox - "Danube Edition"

[Markus Sabadello]

Hello list,

So here's the story.. I have an opportunity to build 100 CubieTrucks
with a nice box and a SATA drive and I would like to call them
FreedomBox - "Danube Edition", and sell them just at the price it costs
to build them. I can present this at the upcoming Elevate festival in
Graz and the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, I have already
demo'd FreedomBox at both events (and others) several times in the past.

I'd be interested in feedback on any or all of the following..

1. Is this a good idea? I made this webpage:
http://projectdanube.org/freedombox/
So the message would basically be "you can get one, you can try to use
it and learn about it, but don't rely on it".
I noticed you just discussed how FreedomBox was not ready for the next
Debian stable, but I think some people who don't know the command line
would still want one.

2. I would like to help add a few things to the box. Most importantly,
support for the Unhosted project, we already dreamed about this 2 years
ago
<http://blog.projectdanube.org/2012/06/freedombox-unhosted-pagekite-for-access-innovation-prize-2012/>,
and it works really well. Another idea would be something that comes out
of the current W3C Social Web work, as well as the IndieWeb community.

3. I already managed to build a working FreedomBox image for CubieTruck,
using freedom-maker and a mainline kernel and some similar steps as with
the recently added Beaglebone support. I'll try to submit a pull request
soon. This does require a modified version of vmdebootstrap, since on
CubieTruck the bootloader must go into a special space between the
partition table and the first partition. I think I found some
information out there by Neil Williams who is aware of this? Basically I
think vmdebootstrap should have a new parameter that can leave this
extra space empty, and then freedom-maker can specify that parameter and
install the bootloader afterwards. For now I summarized what I did to
make it work here
<https://github.com/peacekeeper/freedom-maker/wiki/OS-Start>.

4. I worked on setting up a PageKite service under the domain
freedombox.me, and I wrote a Perl script that integrates the PageKite
server, a DNS server, and a Redis database, to dynamically register new
DNS names and PageKite tunnels given a "voucher code". This is all
similar to how pagekite.me works. So I imagine, if you get a FreedomBox,
you also get one of these "voucher codes" and can choose a
something.freedombox.me subdomain. Michael Pimmer ("fonfon") has been
working on a Plinth extension that can do this registration during
Plinth's first-boot phase. I described the whole setup here
<https://github.com/peacekeeper/freedomkite>.

Thoughts? Maybe we can chat on IRC at some point ("peacekeeper").

Markus

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