[Freedombox-discuss] Finding a good place to start

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 10:13:24AM +0530, Abhishek Dasgupta wrote:
>Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>[snip]
>> As I see it, this is the priorities:
>>  1) put together a (virtual) core system
>>  2) embed the system in small cheap iron
>>  3) make the box dead simple to configure/personalize
>
>So, essentially 3) is the only non-trivial part, right now.

Apparently not so trivial that anyone has taken the time and attention 
to do 1) or 2) yet!



>A website where the users could select options and have an image 
>dynamically generated from them would be cool (like 
>live-build.debian.net) with a set of static images for more common 
>configurations.
>
>User should only have to:
>1. Plug in the plug computer, connect it to local LAN.
>2. Browse to http://freedombox.local/ or something like that and
>   configure.

Yes, that's one approach.  Very broadly described.

If someone is looking for trivial parts to start doing some concrete 
work, I suggest to work on collecting lists of choices.  Here is one 
approach to do that:

  1) Open aptitude in fullscreen-mode
  1a) Mark all installed packages as auto-installed
  1b) Check all packages that now will get uninstalled, and mark as 
      manually installed if really needed on its own (i.e. not only
      needed to support another package)
  2) Customize configurations...
  2a) Before editing a configuration file, save a backup as either
      $file.orig or $file.old - the latter if you suspect that the
      file you have is not "original", e.g. was autogenerated based
      on debconf question during install.
  3) Clone git://source.jones.dk/bin (I put it in /usr/local/bin),
     execute localbackupconfig and localbackuppkglists as root, and 
     check their results (below /tmp if you did not provide a target)

You can do the above on your own laptop or desktop machine - or, if you 
fear that you might break anything in the process then start with a 
fresh install on a separate disk.  I do it on all machines I maintain, 
and execute the scripts during nightly backup routines.

The result of above should then somehow be grouped in classes: Reasons 
for package choices and configuration customizations. E.g. "ALSA", 
"Network", "Gnome", "Webservices", "Mailservices" etc.

We can then share and compare groupings of package choices and 
configuration customizations, and discuss differences.


  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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