[Freedombox-discuss] Update Tracking: FBX Planet?

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Nick Daly (2013-07-03 02:44:41)
> Bob Mottram writes:
> > With all the stories in the news about spying on internet services I 
> > would expect there to be an upswing in interest in things like 
> > Freedombox and privacy related technologies.
> 
> I'm hoping.
> 
> > I assume at this point that the original target hardware from 2010 
> > is considered dated, and it looks as if the prices for the 
> > GlobalScale hardware went in the opposite direction than 
> > anticipated.  Is there a new target hardware platform?  BeagleBone 
> > Black?
> 
> I'm trying to work a RaspberryPi target into FreedomMaker.  Also, the 
> OLinuXino A13 looks nice.  I personally prefer the A13 over similar 
> devices (over the BeagleBone Black and even the RPi) because it's a 
> fully open and free design, in the strong senses of the word.  The 
> fact that FM has to load ~60 M of sourceless firmware + kernel [0] to 
> boot the RPi just rubs me the wrong way.  Of course, I could be wrong 
> about all this, maybe I'm overestimating the package size, and maybe 
> it's not required to boot: I'm still in the research stage, not the 
> execution stage at this point.  We'll know the limitations when it's 
> finished.

...and notice the initial letter "I" in above.  FreedomBox is not really 
tied to a specific device, it is just convenient to _develop_ on a 
limited variety of hardware so as to get distracted by as few 
hardware-specific issues as possible.

Quite a few Debian developers use Lenovo laptops nowadays yet the 
"target hardware" of the Debian distribution is "computers" quite more 
generally.

The target hardware of the FreedomBox project is cheap, low-power and 
preferrably Open Hardware computers that work well with Debian.

We are tracking what might fit that description here: 
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TargetedHardware

If you want something stable today, then a Dreamplug is still a valid 
choice, because it works with stable Debian.

For next stable Debian release (perhaps two years from now) the 
OLinuxIno A13 (or something else appearing on the scene later on) looks 
promising, but the CPU and chipset is only now in the process of getting 
into mainline Linux, and only after that will appear in Debian linux, 
which then needs to stabilize along with the other thousands of 
packages.


 - 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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