[Freedombox-discuss] Summary from my work before 2013-09-23

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Here is a quick status update of my freedombox related activity the
last few weeks.

I started a while back by looking at freedom-maker, to try to figure
out how it worked and what its output was.  I looked at both the repo
from Bdale and Nick, and focused more on the one from Nick based on
recommondation from Bdale.  I discovered that the current setup only
could create disk images with a preinstalled Debian wheezy for armel
and amd64 (virtualbox), which did not match my need for a solution for
one of my spare laptops.  To get a useful system for me, I rewrote the
build system to use a freedombox-setup deb instead of copying files
into a chroot.  This also make it possible to transform any Debian
based system to get a Freedombox setup, and make it trivial to set up
Raspbian like this.  This patch is waiting for Nicks review, and I
hope he agree that this is the direction we should be heading.

When I got a test setup working, I started to investigate the
available services and the web interface to configure the Freedombox.
I discovered that the plinth web service was quite broken, and have
been feeding patches to Nick to fix this.  The plinth web interface is
now starting out of the box when installing using the deb based
recipes I posted earlier, and is able to update the hostname and time
zone on the freedombox.  In the process I started to look at debian
packages for plinth and its dependencies, and thanks to the good work
from Tzafrir Cohen we have build rules for withsqlite (already in
debian unstable), exmachina (not in debian - possibly obsolete) and
plinth (not in debian yet).  If we get plinth and freedombox-setup
into debian unstable/jessie, we would be able to completely develop
the freedombox setup within Debian, and can focus on services instead
of the infrastructure and framework.

To get a useful Freedombox, a bit more than setting the hostname and
time zone should be possible, so the last week I have used the setup
description for the Onion Pi to create a Tor config screen in
plinth[1] and the last few days I have started on a Owncloud config
screen in plinth[2].  Both depend on a patch replacing exmachina with
a sudo based system to give plinth privileges[3] and the tor support
depend on a patch to add radio button support[4] to the plinth web
form code.  Owncloud will provide the calendar service that was my
goal at the start, and quite a lot of other nice services too. :)

 1) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/tor-support >
 2) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/app-owncloud >
 3) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/sudo-not-exmachina >
 4) <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/Plinth/tree/forms-radio-buttons >.

Both the tor and owncloud patches need more work before they are
really useful, but should provide an idea about what we chould do with
the Freedombox.  I hope to get them working the way I want them within
a week or two, and really hope Nick find time to merge the changes
into his upstream repository or give some feedback if I am heading in
the wrong direction.

I've noticed monkeysphere is installed in the current images, but have
been unable to understand exactly what it should be used for on the
Freedombox.  It seem to be more useful on users laptops?

I've also noticed the freedombuddy code, which isn't installed nor
activated on the Freedombox installations, but have not had time to
try to figure out what it is supposed to do.

At the moment there is not SSL handling at all in plinth nor in the
freedombox setup, making both jwchat plinth and owncloud show up
without encryption and passing password in clear text.  This really
should be changed, but I have not yet figured out what the plan for
SSL is nor who is working on fixing it for Freedombox.  Anyone able to
enlighten me?

I probably forgot something (like the xmpp/jwchat stuff), but it is
getting late and I guess it is better to send it now than delay my
quick status email any further.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen