FreedomBox

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Revision as of 05:48, 5 June 2018 by Joseph (talk | contribs) (Migrate contributing to FreedomBox email to wiki)

My personal notes about using FreedomBox and self-hosted applications.


Learning Resources

Here are some links to improve your understanding of FreedomBox.

1. The legendary talk from which FreedomBox and Diaspora (federated social network) were born.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vOF8VsUwbA

2. Sunil Mohan's first demonstration of FreedomBox.
http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/sflc2015/04_freedombox.webm

3. An old blog post I wrote on how to install FreedomBox on a Raspberry Pi 2
https://njoseph.me/ikiwiki/blog/posts/you_don__8217__t_have_to_be_a_geek_to_setup_freedombox__33__/

Learn more at the FreedomBox wiki


Contributing to FreedomBox

There are many ways of contributing to FreedomBox. Have your pick!

Development

- Web application development (plinth)
- Making FreedomBox available on more hardware devices (freedom-maker)
- Android app development (android-app)
- Debian packaging for potential FreedomBox applications
- Creating Plinth apps for existing Debian applications
- Writing functional tests
- Language translations
- Write content for manual on the wiki or upload screenshots
- Translate manual content into your language
- Report bugs (salsa)
- Provide feedback on user experience
- Contribute UX designs and icons
- Contribute to the free software applications on FreedomBox
- Join Progress Calls and Hack Calls
- Identify new applications to be integrated into FreedomBox

Community Engagement

- Setup a FreedomBox for your family members
- Volunteer for a village/college deployment
- Spread the message on social networks
- Improve community FreedomBox wiki
- Talk about FreedomBox at conferences
- Organize an Install Fest
- Write blogs on your experience with using FreedomBox
- Make a donation to the FreedomBox Foundation
- Create marketing material like posters and brochures

Links

1. FreedomBox Wiki https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
2. FreedomBox Manual https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual
3. Code repositories https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/
4. Wish list of applications for FreedomBox https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud


Tips and Tricks

Software

  • Matrix Synapse works for voice and video calls over LAN. It seems to be P2P.
  • Use Syncthing with Orgzly/Emacs for writing lists.
  • Use Boostnote with Syncthing for note-taking and lists if Orgzly seems too weird. Boostnote has Github-flavored markdown.

Mediawiki

  • Use MediaWiki for taking notes as I'm doing right now and as a personal knowledge base.
  • Since MediaWiki on FreedomBox doesn't have the Visual Editor extension yet, use Wikipedia's Sandbox to write your content in the Visual Editor, and after you're done, switch back to source code editing mode. You can then cut and paste the content into your MediaWiki instance.

Tiny Tiny RSS

  • Tiny Tiny RSS web UI is unpalatable for people used to things like Medium, but the official Android app is really good.
  • Follow medium blogs using Tiny Tiny RSS without having to create an account.
  • Follow activity feed from GitLab sites (e.g. Debian Salsa) using TT-RSS.
  • Backup Tiny Tiny RSS feeds list (the opml file) to a Syncthing folder.
  • Add feed subscriptions to Tiny Tiny RSS from Firefox.
  • Use Privoxy for ad-blocking on all the Android devices on the Wi-Fi by setting it as a proxy.

Hardware

  • Make sure the device is getting adequate power supply (e.g. 2 Amp for a Raspberry Pi) or the performance will suffer.
  • Your microSD card's speed impacts performance of your FreedomBox more than anything else. Make sure to buy something fast enough (UHS 1 or more).
  • microSD cards are unreliable in general. Make sure to keep a dd backup of the entire SD card to another computer frequently.

Raspberry Pi 3 Wi-Fi Access Point

Raspberry Pi 3 comes with a built-in Broadcom Wi-Fi module. The firmware for this is non-free and must be installed manually on FreedomBox.

Run the commands in the following steps on the FreedomBox using ssh.

  1. A file must be added to the firmware directory first.
cd /lib/firmware/brcm/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/54bab3d6a6d43239c71d26464e6e10e5067ffea7/brcm80211/brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt
  1. Make sure that non-free is enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list
  2. Install the package firmware-brcm80211
  3. reboot or run rmmod brcmfmac && modprobe brcmfmac

After this, if you run the 'ip addr' command, you should see a new 'wlan0' interface come up.

Go to Plinth -> Networks -> Add WiFi, select device, give any name, set ssid, set infrastructure mode, ipv4 shared mode and set access point password. Then activate connection to get Wi-Fi access point from FreedomBox.

Unsupported Software

NextCloud

NextCloud is a Google Drive replacement that

  • can update itself
  • can play a lot of multimedia formats and display epub files
  • has a simple project-tracking tool similar to Trello
  • can be a personal content server with streaming capabilities
  • can be used as a CalDAV/WebDAV server (contacts and calendar sync)
  • can store your bookmarks
  • has cool mobile apps
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