[Freedombox-discuss] My recap of FreedomBox Hackathon weekend

[Sean McIntyre]

Hey all,

Wanted to recap my experience at the hackathon this weekend.

- Great to meet the team. I'm very appreciative of Ian and James to
make themselves available for such a long time.

- The micro-SD card distros that were handed to us had bugs that
required us face-time from Ian, Nick Daly, or James, who happened to
know how to resolve the bugs.

In particular, there is a missing symlink from "/etc/resolvconf/run"
to "/run/resolvconf".

Also I believe there are also remnants in the /etc/fstab that no
longer apply to the present system.

This cost cycles from three of us who wanted to get up and running for
the first time. Please fix this. (I can't.)

- FreedomBox works on the GuruPlug. I have documentation here
<http://wiki.debian.org/GuruPlugTesting> (most of it is copied from
Ian and his DreamPlug guide).

- There was no infrastructure to connect my FreedomBox to the
Internet. Normally something that is easy to do on Debian, it was a
challenge to get my FreedomBox updated with software packages to
develop at the hackathon. Perhaps more experienced developers of the
platform have favourite methods of connecting to the Internet when
mobile (tethering, etc.), but most of us were unprepared for this.

At home, I solve this problem by physically connecting my plug
computers to my Ethernet router.

- Plinth needs some simple upgrades and example patterns to ease
people into it. Two simple ideas right now:

(a) Make a less scary error message when a user tries to log into
Plinth with a nonexistent user/pass. I got a stack trace to a
__getitem__ method, which, imo, is very scary. (Exception happens when
a SELECT database call returns None and you try to access index [0] of
None.)

(b) I tried to develop directly on my FreedomBox because I took the
task of adding a web interface and backend scripts for wireless
capabilities of the device. There's something hardcoded in there to
use 127.0.0.1 on every redirect, which got me nowheres!

I'm fine with fixing those two small bugs, but I'm providing examples
of what made hacking at the hackathon hard. There's a lot of interest
surrounding this project, but maybe a little work could go a long way
to utilizing people's time.

Thanks again! See you at the next one, or perhaps before then.

Sean