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Download and Install

Welcome to the FreedomBox download page.

You may either install FreedomBox on one of the supported inexpensive hardware devices, on any Debian operating system, or deploy it on a virtual machine.

Installing on a machine running a Debian system is easy because FreedomBox is available as a package. We do recommend to install FreedomBox on a supported single board computer (SBC). The board will be dedicated for FreedomBox use from home, this will prevent a lot of risks, such as accidental misconfiguration by the user. In case of trouble deciding which hardware is best for you or during the installation, please use the support page or read the Questions and Answers page based on posts on the Freedombox-discuss mailing list archives.

Downloading on Debian

If you are installing on an existing Debian installation, you don't need to download these images. Instead, read the instructions on setting up FreedomBox on Debian.

Downloading for SBC or Virtual Machine

Prepare your device

Read the hardware specific instructions on how to prepare your device at the Hardware section. On the web, there is a lot of documentation about setting your device up and flashing USB or SD Cards to boot your hardware.

Downloading Images

Recent images for supported targets are available here:

Verifying the Downloaded Images

It is important to verify the images you have downloaded to ensure that the file has not been corrupted during the transmission and that it is indeed the image built by FreedomBox developers.

Note: Testing and nightly images are automatically signed by the FreedomBox CI server.

Installation

After the download you can use the image to boot your chosen hardware (including virtual machines). You'll need to copy the image to the memory card or USB stick as follows:

  1. Figure out which device your card actually is.
    1. Unplug your card.
    2. Run dmesg -w to show and follow the kernel messages.

    3. Plug your card in. You will see messages such as following:
      [33299.023096] usb 4-6: new high-speed USB device number 12 using ehci-pci
      [33299.157160] usb 4-6: New USB device found, idVendor=058f, idProduct=6361
      [33299.157162] usb 4-6: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
      [33299.157164] usb 4-6: Product: Mass Storage Device
      [33299.157165] usb 4-6: Manufacturer: Generic
      [33299.157167] usb 4-6: SerialNumber: XXXXXXXXXXXX
      [33299.157452] usb-storage 4-6:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
      [33299.157683] scsi host13: usb-storage 4-6:1.0
      [33300.155626] scsi 13:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic- Compact Flash    1.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
      [33300.156223] scsi 13:0:0:1: Direct-Access     Multiple Flash Reader     1.05 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
      [33300.157059] sd 13:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
      [33300.157462] sd 13:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
      [33300.462115] sd 13:0:0:1: [sdg] 30367744 512-byte logical blocks: (15.5 GB/14.4 GiB)
      [33300.464144] sd 13:0:0:1: [sdg] Write Protect is off
      [33300.464159] sd 13:0:0:1: [sdg] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
      [33300.465896] sd 13:0:0:1: [sdg] No Caching mode page found
      [33300.465912] sd 13:0:0:1: [sdg] Assuming drive cache: write through
      [33300.470489] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk
      [33300.479493]  sdg: sdg1
      [33300.483566] sd 13:0:0:1: [sdg] Attached SCSI removable disk
    4. In the above case, the disk that is newly inserted is available as /dev/sdg. Very carefully note this and use it in the copying step below.

  2. Decompress the downloaded image using tar:
    $ xz -d freedombox-stable-free_buster_cubietruck-armhf.img.xz

    The above command is an example for the cubietruck stable image. Your downloaded file name will be different.

  3. Copy the image to your card. Double check to make sure you don't write to your computer's main storage (such as /dev/sda). Also make sure that you don't run this step as root to avoid potentially overriding data on your hard drive due to a mistake in identifying the device or errors while typing the command. USB disks and SD cards inserted into the system should typically be write accessible to normal users. If you don't have permission to write to your SD card as a user, you may need to run this command as root. In this case triple check everything before you run the command. Another safety precaution is to unplug all external disks except the SD card before running the command.

    For example, if your SD card is /dev/sdg as noted in the first step above, then to copy the image, run:

    $ dd bs=1M if=freedombox-stable-free_buster_cubietruck-armhf.img of=/dev/sdg conv=fdatasync status=progress

An alternative to copy to SD card command

On MS Windows you will need a tool like etcher. On MacOS (OSX) you can use programs like balenaetcher and rosaimagewriter.

Troubleshooting

Obtaining Source Code

FreedomBox is fully free software and you can obtain the source code to study, modify and distribute improvements.

From within FreedomBox

FreedomBox is made up of several software programs and you can obtain the source code to any of them. These instructions are similar to obtaining and building source code for Debian since FreedomBox is a pure blend of Debian. Using this process you can obtain the source code to the exact version of the package you are currently using in FreedomBox.

  1. To see the list of software packages installed on your FreedomBox, run the following in a terminal:

    dpkg -l
  2. To obtain the source code for any of those programs, then run:
    apt source <package_name>

    This requires that the apt sources list contains information about the source code repositories. These are present by default on all FreedomBox images. If you have installed FreedomBox using a package from Debian, you need to ensure that source repositories are added in the file.

  3. To build the package from source code, first install its dependencies
    apt build-dep <package_name>

    Switch to the source directory created by the apt source command:

    cd <source_directory>
    Then build the package
     dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc
  4. Install the package:
     dpkg -i ../<built_package>.deb

Other Ways to Obtain Source Code

  1. Source code for any of the packages can be browsed and searched using the web interface at sources.debian.org. For example, see the plinth package.

  2. Source code and pre-built binary package for any version of a package including historic versions can be obtained from snapshot.debian.org. For example, see the plinth package.

  3. You can also obtain the links to upstream project homepage, upstream version control, Debian's version control, changelog, etc. from the Debian tracker page for a project at tracker.debian.org. For example, see the tracker page for plinth package.

  4. You can build and install a package from its Debian's version control repository. For example,
     git clone https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/freedombox.git
     cd freedombox
     apt build-dep .
     dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc
     dpkg -i ../freedombox*.deb

Building Disk Images

You can also build FreedomBox disk images for various hardware platforms using the freedom-maker tool. This is also available as a Debian package and source code for it may be obtained using the above methods. Build instructions for creating disk images are available as part of the source code for freedom-maker package.

FreedomBox disk images are built and uploaded to official servers using automated Continuous Integration infrastructure. This infrastructure is available as source code too and provides accurate information on how FreedomBox images are built.

U-boot on Pioneer Edition Images

There is one minor exception to the u-boot package present on the hardware sold as FreedomBox Home Server Kits Pioneer Edition. It contains a small but important fix that is not part of Debian sources. The fork of the Debian u-boot source repository along with the minor change done by the FreedomBox is available as a separate repository. We expect this change to be available in upstream u-boot eventually and this repository will not be needed. This package can be built on a Debian armhf machine as follows (cross compiling is also possible, simply follow instructions for cross compiling Debian packages):

apt install git git-buildpackage
git clone https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/u-boot.git
cd u-boot
pbuilder create --distribution=buster
gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder

The u-boot Debian package will be available in u-boot-sunxi*.deb. This package will contain

mkdir temp
dpkg -x u-boot-suxi*.deb temp
unxz <lime2_image_built_with_freedom_maker>
dd if=temp/usr/lib/u-boot/A20-OLinuXino-Lime2/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=<lime2.img> seek=8 bs=1k conv=notrunc

The resulting image will have the modified u-boot in it.


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