To browse the Internet through your FreedomBox:

Now that you've put a wiki together, you might as well publish it to the Internet. To publish material to the Internet, you need two things:

You already have the place to host data, it's this FreedomBox. Now, you just need a name.

While it's possible to buy your own domain name, it's a rather tedious and complicated process. Many folks have had good luck with "reverse proxies," things like PageKite. Other reverse proxy services are also available.

When your FreedomBox first starts, it has two accounts: a root account for system maintenance, and a normal user who doesn't have the power to mess with how the system works. The default passwords for each of those users are:

You'll need this information if you want to log in, as explained in the next section. Also, after you log in, you should probably change the default passwords. Otherwise, anybody else who reads this document could log into your box, too.

These instructions will teach you how to log in, via ssh, to your FreedomBox.

Make a habit of logging in as root only when you need to. If you aren't logged in as root, you can't accidentally break everything. Even if everything does break though, don't worry, it can still be fixed, it'll just take a couple hours. See the Getting Help section for more details.

To change your password, log in to your FreedomBox as the user whose password you want to change. Then, run the following command:

$ passwd

That'll ask you for your current password before giving you the opportunity to put in a new one.

These instructions will teach you how to keep your FreedomBox up to date with the latest software releases.

Chances are good the "upgrade" command will ask you if it's alright to install some packages and use some disk space. Say "yes", because that's what you want it to do.

If those commands complete successfully, then congratulations, you've just updated your FreedomBox! If they don't complete successfully ask for help, as described in the Getting Help section.

Ever wonder what all those holes and fiddly bits were called?

  1   2      3  4    5
  :   :      :  :    :
     ________________________
    |    |   || .  |__|      |
----\____|___||___O___O__O___/
      `                     `
      :      :    :   :  :
      6      7    8   9  10

        11  12  13         2    1
          ::    :          :    :
     ________________________
    |     .. |___|     |     |
    \______------__||__|_____/----
     `                     `
     :       :     :
     6       14    7

Freedom Maker is the tool used to create a running FreedomBox system. It creates the bootable system image that lives on the DreamPlug's microSD card.

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=freedombox/freedom-maker.git;a=summary

Plinth is the FreedomBox's administration UI. It's not done yet, but it will be included in future FreedomBox updates when it's finished.

https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth

Privoxy is the FreedomBox's privacy-preserving web-proxy.

https://github.com/jvasile/freedombox-privoxy

You can also review these instructions online:

http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Firmware

These instructions are from Ian Campbell, using uboot version 2012.04.01-2, which is the current version in Debian's Wheezy release.

Prepare your system:

# wget http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/u/u-boot/u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel.deb
# dpkg-deb -x u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel.deb u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel
# cp -r u-boot_2012.04.01-2_armel/usr/lib/u-boot/dreamplug /mnt

Move the USB drive to your DreamPlug, and connect to your system via JTAG. Connect the UART DreamPlug port to the JTAG Board's UART port or connect the JTAG DreamPlug port to the JTAG Board's JTAG port. Next, plug the USB cord into your main system and access the serial port with:

# screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Now, interrupt the boot process so you can flash it from within the bootloader, before the GNU/Linux system takes over:

> usb start
> fatload usb 2 0x6400000 dreamplug/u-boot.kwb
> sf probe 0
> sf erase 0x0 0x80000
> sf write 0x6400000 0x0 0x${filesize}

You must, of course, fill in the size of the file you're loading in hex. At this point, you should be able to reset the DreamPlug and have it boot to a serial console prompt. If that fails, you'll need real JTAG magic to try again.

Note that freedom-maker now includes DreamPlug firmware in the FAT partition on USB stick targets. To use a freedom-maker USB stick to update your u-boot, ignore the instructions above about how to wget and extract the firmware, and just connect to the DreamPlug and follow the bootloader instructions.

On another system, download the Freedom-Maker repoistory and follow the README to build your own image that you can plug into your DreamPlug:

$ git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/freedombox/freedom-maker.git ~/freedom-maker

There are a number of incomplete projects that you might find useful, for setting up a wiki, an IM server, and so forth. To check these out, download the repository:

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/nickdaly/plugserver ~/plugserver

Then, read the README. It's pretty detailed. A word of warning, though: the FreedomBox Foundation folks think that using PHP-based services, like the blog service included in that plugserver repository, is a generally poor idea. Just use the wiki instead.

Also, if you can, it may be best to wait until these tools are fully integrated into the FreedomBox image. Otherwise, migrating from these custom tools to the officially supported FreedomBox tools may be difficult. Ultimately, that decision is up to you.