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Questions and Answers - FreedomBox
1. General introduction
Q: What is FreedomBox ?
A:
Q: What does it do ?
A: FreedomBox allows you to provide services to your family and friends (email, files and bookmarks hosting, remote storage, chat, wiki/blog), to protect your private life against advertising compagnies while surfing on the net and to stay anonymous on the network. FreedomBox sets and upgrade automatically the security of these services. You can connect to FreedomBox when you are outside your home in a secure manner to access to services and reach other personal computers or electronic devices. You can chose to route your mobile phone trafic via your FreedomBox using your internet connection at home. You can also do group audio chats and bitorrent, even on very simple hardware.
Q: What is the link between Debian and FreedomBox?
A: FreedomBox is a subset of Debian - available for some boards as a pre-installed image and generally available as a Debian package to be installed on top of a minimal pristine install of Debian.
Q: May i ask a question ?
A: Feel free to add your question on this page (and answer if you have it) signing up and using edit feature. Answers mostly come from the FreedomBox discussion list achives.
2. Hardware (SBC)
Q: A thing that is new to me is OpenHardware. What makes open hardware open? Anything in particular that I should be aware of? (see discussion)
A: Please use the more specific term "Open Source Hardware" or OSHW. OSHW is a definition intended to ensure your ability to "fork" a piece of hardware - i.e. pay a different factory to produce identical or derived hardware. Imagine a certain antenna vendor going bankrupt but you've created a business soldering their very particular antenna onto spaceships - when you have the "source code" for their hardware, you can pay a different vendor to produce identical antennas - and even modify them (e.g. if some particular chip inside has gone out of fashion and you wanna replace with another than requires different wiring. "Open Hardware" is a vague term (ab)used to mean several different things related to openness of hardware. Some hardware vendors promote their boards as "open" and provide a PDF of their board design - which may be good enough to make an identical copy but not enough to fork (is it complex to rewire when you don't have the source for _computing_ the layout of electrical wiring.
Q: What is a single board computer (SBC)?
A:
Q: Do I need a single board computer like Cubietruck or Raspberry PI to run FreedomBox?
A: No, you can run FreedomBox on any computer that you can install Debian on. The FreedomBox team provides images for some of the more common single board computers and for virtual box to make it easier for people to get up and running. But you can install FreedomBox on any debian computer by installing the freedombox-setup package.
Q: Having never used such a device before what are your experiences in terms of performance with these small machines (SBC)? (see discussion)
A: On such tiny boxes you may not only wanna think about performance: The more performing boxes may(!) also be the more energy-consuming and therefore easier getting hot, needing a fan, and therefore noisier and potentially having a shorter lifespan. Different kinds of ARM devices perform different with same amount of energy - Allwinner-based boards of same grade (e.g. Cubietruck and LIME2 both built around Allwinner A20) roughly perform the same, whereas Sitara-based ones (like ?BeagleBone Black) is rumored to do some things more efficiently even if superficial specs may seem lower. Performance may be less important on a server than on a desktop system. I strongly believe the LIME2 is currently the best option, but that's just my subjective balance between performance, memory, openness and other factors. If price matters more then consider OLinuXIno LIME which has some but not all of above benefits but half the memory.
A:if you're looking to compare the LIME and MICRO performance, both being Allwinner A20 board from OLIMEX, see this technical benchmark (it seems to mostly depend on whether you're willing to pay 20 EUR for an extra 512 MB RAM.)
A: In my experience running on a Beaglebone black, it is capable of running most day to day needs (mail,website,php..) except for big php applications like Apache+wordpress or owncloud. They can run but are a bit sluggish. Apache and Mysql will definitely need to be tuned to use less CPU/memory.
A: Although a bit pricer than others, the APU 1D is probably the fastest single board computer I have tested. It has an AMD G series dual core APU, 3 Gigabit Ethernet controllers and the boot firmware is Coreboot.
Q: I'm wondering what wifi adapter to get, preferably one that runs with free firmware, can you recommend one?
A: You can take a look at the wiki page USB WiFi for serapated devices that do not require non-free firmware.
A:The MOD-WIFI-R5370-ANT from olimex works really well, but needs a non-free firmware blob, the antenna is a bit fragile and on the MICRO you probably better connect it with some extension cable because the plug quite big. If you are willing to pay more, take a look at: fsf.org, tehnoetic.com and thinkpenguin.com
3. Download and Install
Q: Do i have to install first Debian on a Cubietruck or is FreedomBox a system in itself?
A: The 0.6 cubietruck image is a full system.
Q: What should i know about installing Freedombox on SBCs ?
A: You should know that you should gather and read a lot of documentation about a first boot on your hardware. You can find documentation on the FreedomBox wiki or searching the net. Single Board Cards (SBC) have their own booting system, their own Bios if you like. You should then study pre-requirements in addition to the use of FreedomBox image file. Some SBCs suffer from a lake of official documentation.
Q: What does mean "flashing an SD card"?
A:
Q: I'm happy to give the LIME2 board a try. Should't be a problem to flash that with freedombox image, should it? (see discussion)
A: Yes, it is a problem: NAND support for the Allwinner chips as used on the Olinuxino A20 boards is still not available, and thus I don't believe they are usable with freedombox (at least not in an easy way).
4. About FreedomBox community
Q: If somebody can connect me with the persons inside FreedomBox I need to talk to it would be great.
A: By writing to the mailing list or connecting to the IRC channel, you are addressing all the people contributing to FreedomBox. If you wish to talk to the active contributors, I suggest joining the monthly VOIP progress calls.
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