[Freedombox-discuss] the "living room brick"

[Jaromil]

hi Jonas,

On Wed, 27 Apr 2011, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

>  all parts of the system must be...
> 
>   a) The product must be long-term maintainable.
>   b) All services contribute to "the silverlining of the cloud"

sry for my ignorance, but what does "silverlining" means?

> In my opinion a) is best done by mandating _all_ software parts - no
> exceptions - come from Debian proper (any and all configuration
> scripts or tiny hacks adopted into Debian main).

+1

> In my opinion b) means that services to ease and/or secure access to
> centralized services are irrelevant (and therefore unsuitable) for
> FreedomBox, no matter if gigantic and commercially driven (like
> Google, Yahoo or Facebook) or not-yet-biggest or non-cemmercially
> driven (like identi.ca or riseup.net).

+1

and thanks for the recap, these are valuable... opinions :)

> It makes perfect sense to me for FreedomBox to include both
> public-facing and discretion-seeking tools, including those provided
> by gigantic commercial entities - as long as they comply with the
> Debian Free Software Guidelines.

why not the Free Software Foundation guidelines?

it's a nitpick, but it would make it easier for all the noobs out
there that have likely never heard about the "Debian" word, but can
relate and maybe have already heard of this Free Software definition,
IMHO.


>  So things like Wordpress or status.net or Crabgrass (when hosted on
> the box itself, not -as-a-service hosted at wordpress.com,
> identi.ca, riseup.net or anywhere else), are good candidates for
> inclusion - when done via packaging in Debian main.

i'd rather set i2p and other decentralized anonymous network in front
of it, still i really like the idea of having crabgrass, lorea and
other social networking software packaged in Debian.

however, aren't we stepping into the domain of GNU Social here?

is freedombox mostly related to social network interaction?

again pardon for my ignorance.



> > Espacially for the "end-user-building" purpose I would like to
> > show you the following (discontinued) hardware:
> > 
> > http://www.xtreamer.net/etrayz/specs.aspx
> > 
> > this little brick, takes about 20 Watts, hosts two 3,5" SATA
> > drives (up to 4TB) and runs a custom linux with available source.
> 
> Nice!
> 
> It concerns me, however, that it contains a fan

well, the WD HD TV is worth less than 100$ and has an homebrew
firmware http://WDLXTV.com and its mipsel architecture can be targeted
by Emdebian cross-compiling tools, good candidate i'd say! but..

yet my question here is does it makes sense to choose an hardware
platform, rather than a compilation toolchain that can produce the
freedombox software for all complying hardware platforms?

that's what i call freedom: that i'm able to modify a wide range of
devices found on the shelf around the world thanks to the GNU GCC
compiler and a bunch of freedomlovers packing together the freedombox,
which is easy to compile and has a community doing builds of it for
various platforms...

of course again IMHO, with lots of ignorance about freedombox, but
also lots of fun experience in playing with embedded device hacking in
the past 10 years and i can tell once again the Debian call here is
good and Emdebian works like a charm :D

ciao


-- 
jaromil,  dyne.org developer,  http://jaromil.dyne.org
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