+
I was introduced to the
+Freedombox project
+in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
+of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
+within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
+people back the power over their network and machines, and return
+Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
+depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
+control over their own basic infrastructure.
+
+
I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
+taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
+and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
+communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
+actually started working on the project a while back.
+
+
The initial
+Debian initiative based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
+create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
+up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
+communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
+Dreamplug,
+which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
+the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
+it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
+freedom-maker
+image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
+setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
+set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
+the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
+missing in Debian).
+
+
The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
+scripts
+(freedombox-setup),
+and a administrative web interface
+(plinth + exmachina +
+withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
+privoxy
+(freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
+client (jwchat)
+trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
+(ejabberd). The
+web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
+services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
+this is really working yet, see
+the
+project TODO for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
+on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
+box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
+users. I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
+know there are several branches spread around github and other places
+with lots of half baked features.
+
+
Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
+following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
+at.
+
+
Debian Wheezy amd64
+
+
+
+- Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
+- Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.
+Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
+to the Debian installer:
+
url=http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
- Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
+install on.
+
+- When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
+few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.
+
+
+
+
Raspberry Pi Raspbian
+
+
+
+- Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.
+- Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.
+Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:
+
+deb http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox wheezy main
+
Run this as root:
+
+wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
+ apt-key add -
+apt-get update
+apt-get install freedombox-setup
+/usr/lib/freedombox/setup
+
- Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.
+
+
+
+
You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
+freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
+the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
+in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
+short "apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy" away. :)
+
+
Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
+192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
+off the DHCP server by running "update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
+disable" as root.
+
+
Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
+problems. We gather on the IRC channel
+#freedombox on
+irc.debian.org and the
+project
+mailing list.
+
+
Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
+http://your-host-name:8001/ to see the state of the plint
+welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
+get past it), and next visit http://your-host-name:8001/help/
+to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is 'admin' and the
+default password is 'secret'.
+
+