Here is a quick status update of my freedombox related activity the last few weeks.
I started a while back by looking at freedom-maker, to try to figure out how it worked and what its output was. I looked at both the repo from Bdale and Nick, and focused more on the one from Nick based on recommondation from Bdale. I discovered that the current setup only could create disk images with a preinstalled Debian wheezy for armel and amd64 (virtualbox), which did not match my need for a solution for one of my spare laptops. To get a useful system for me, I rewrote the build system to use a freedombox-setup deb instead of copying files into a chroot. This also make it possible to transform any Debian based system to get a Freedombox setup, and make it trivial to set up Raspbian like this. This patch is waiting for Nicks review, and I hope he agree that this is the direction we should be heading. When I got a test setup working, I started to investigate the available services and the web interface to configure the Freedombox. I discovered that the plinth web service was quite broken, and have been feeding patches to Nick to fix this. The plinth web interface is now starting out of the box when installing using the deb based recipes I posted earlier, and is able to update the hostname and time zone on the freedombox. In the process I started to look at debian packages for plinth and its dependencies, and thanks to the good work from Tzafrir Cohen we have build rules for withsqlite (already in debian unstable), exmachina (not in debian - possibly obsolete) and plinth (not in debian yet). If we get plinth and freedombox-setup into debian unstable/jessie, we would be able to completely develop the freedombox setup within Debian, and can focus on services instead of the infrastructure and framework. To get a useful Freedombox, a bit more than setting the hostname and time zone should be possible, so the last week I have used the setup description for the Onion Pi to create a Tor config screen in plinth[1] and the last few days I have started on a Owncloud config screen in plinth[2]. Both depend on a patch replacing exmachina with a sudo based system to give plinth privileges[3] and the tor support depend on a patch to add radio button support[4] to the plinth web form code. Owncloud will provide the calendar service that was my goal at the start, and quite a lot of other nice services too. :) 1) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/tor-support > 2) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/app-owncloud > 3) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/sudo-not-exmachina > 4) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/forms-radio-buttons >. Both the tor and owncloud patches need more work before they are really useful, but should provide an idea about what we chould do with the Freedombox. I hope to get them working the way I want them within a week or two, and really hope Nick find time to merge the changes into his upstream repository or give some feedback if I am heading in the wrong direction. I've noticed monkeysphere is installed in the current images, but have been unable to understand exactly what it should be used for on the Freedombox. It seem to be more useful on users laptops? I've also noticed the freedombuddy code, which isn't installed nor activated on the Freedombox installations, but have not had time to try to figure out what it is supposed to do. At the moment there is not SSL handling at all in plinth nor in the freedombox setup, making both jwchat plinth and owncloud show up without encryption and passing password in clear text. This really should be changed, but I have not yet figured out what the plan for SSL is nor who is working on fixing it for Freedombox. Anyone able to enlighten me? I probably forgot something (like the xmpp/jwchat stuff), but it is getting late and I guess it is better to send it now than delay my quick status email any further. -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
