User:John/FreedomBox

According to the manual you can find a freedombox with e.g.:

$ nmap -p 80 --open -sV 10.1.1.0/24

You can download images from https://ftp.freedombox.org/pub/freedombox/hardware/a20-olinuxino-lime2/ or https://ftp.freedombox.org/pub/freedombox/pioneer/ -- the latter may have better networking support.

According to the download page you can write a MicroSD image with e.g.:

$ xz -d freedombox.img.xz
$ sudo chown jj5:disk /dev/sde
$ dd bs=1M conv=fdatasync status=progress of=/dev/sde if=freedombox.img

I am thinking about the OOTB user experience.

Questions

What's the BIND and Internet connection sharing incompatibility?

In /plinth under System -> BIND it says the BIND service incompatible with sharing Internet connection from FreedomBox. I would like to know what is the Internet connection sharing feature and why is it incompatible with BIND? If we ran bind on a separate IP address or in a VM/container could that resolve the compatibility issue?

See: issue 1960

Why is Cockpit under /_cockpit?

Wouldn't it be better if Cockpit was under /cockpit rather than /_cockpit? What's the idea with the leading underscore? I notice we don't do anything like that with /plinth...

See: issue 1961

Issues

These are some brief notes about issues I encountered while trying to get my first fbx (a Pioneer FreedomBox from Olimex) installed and configured.

My HDMI display doesn't turn on when I first boot

That's normal. Don't wait for your HDMI display to come online. Rather, try to access your FreedomBox via its web interface at http://freedombox.local/

See: issue 1958

My FreedomBox stable/testing image won't boot

If you've followed the instructions on the download page and you can't boot off your MicroSD card (and/or disk utilities like GPartEd report a missing/corrupt partition table) make sure you didn't dd/cat the compressed .img.xz file to the MicroSD device and that you first extracted the .img file with xz -d before writing it to your device (e.g. /dev/sde).

My FreedomBox nightly image isn't working

As at 3rd September 2020 the nightly images here hadn't been updated since 5th May 2020, so they were well out of date. I'm not sure if this problem is limited to a20-olinuxino-lime2 nightly builds, but best to stick with stable or testing builds instead (in the #freedombox IRC channel I was recommended to use stable).

See: issue 1959

My Pioneer FreedomBox from Olimex won't boot

Check that your MicroSD card actually has a valid operating system image on it. You can do this by pluging it into another system to examine its contents. If you have a blank MicroSD card that might be the problem!