The Freedombox +project is working on to providing the software and hardware for +making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and +communication at home, and being able to communicate with their +friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been +going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test +release (0.2). And what day could be better than the Pi day to +announce that the new version will provide "hard drive"/SD card/USB +stick images for Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other +virtualization system), and can also be installed using a Debian +installer preseed file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on +Debian Jessie, where most of the needed packages used are already +present. Only one, the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try +to build your own boot image to test the current status, fetch the +freedom-maker scripts and build using +vmdebootstrap +with a user with sudo access to become root: + +
+git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \ + freedom-maker +sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \ + mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \ + u-boot-tools +make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image ++ +
Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback +devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not +want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to a race condition in +vmdebootstrap, the build might fail without the patch to the +kpartx call.
+ +If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed +method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load +the preseed values:
+ ++url=http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat ++ +
But note that due to a +recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie, the installer will +currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the +'apt-cdrom ident' process when it hang a few times during the +installation will get the installation going. This affect all +installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.
+ +Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help +us get the new release published. :) Please join us on +IRC (#freedombox on +irc.debian.org) and +the +mailing list if you want to help make this vision come true. +