Newer and shinier than before, Freedombone release 3.1 rests upon the solid foundation of Debian stable and delivers major new self-hosted apps, improved mesh networking and a new logo. It supports version 3 onion addresses and the ability to use email with onion and I2P addresses. New apps are:
- Akaunting: Personal or small business accounts
- bdsmail: Avoid PGP complexity by using email over I2P
- Bludit: Painless markdown blogging
- Edith: The simplest possible note taking system
- Icecast: Run your own internet radio station
- PeerTube: Peer-to-peer video hosting system
- Pleroma: Ultra lightweight fediverse instance with Mastodon compatibility
The mesh version now supports BMX6, OLSR2 and Babel routing protocols on layer 3 and so is protocol compatible with LibreMesh. It also now runs on pure IPv6 and has built in video editor and CryptPad integration for networked collaboration even during times when the internet is not available.
With the monopolistic Silicon Valley technology companies facing unprecedented levels of criticism there has never been a better time to avoid all of that and host systems yourself.
The future is decentralized.
Installation
The simplest way to install is from a pre-made disk image. Images can be downloaded here. You will need to have previously obtained a domain name and have a dynamic DNS account somewhere.
Copy the image to a microSD card or USB thumb drive, replacing sdX with the identifier of the USB thumb drive. Don't include any numbers (so for example use sdc instead of sdc1).
unxz downloadedimagefile.img.xz dd bs=1M if=downloadedimagefile.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fdatasync
And wait. It will take a while to copy over. When that's done you might want to increase the partition size on the drive, using a tool such as Gparted. Whether you need to do that will depend upon how many apps you intend to install and how much data they will store.
Plug the microSD or USB drive into the target hardware which you want to use as a server and power on. If you're using an old laptop or netbook as the server then you will need to set the BIOS to boot from USB.
As the system boots for the first time the login is:
username: fbone password: freedombone
If you're installing from a microSD card on a single board computer without a screen and keyboard attached then you can ssh into it with:
ssh fbone@freedombone.local -p 2222
Using the initial password "freedombone". If you have trouble accessing the server then make sure you have Avahi installed and mDNS enabled.
You will then be shown a new randomly generated password. It's very important that you write this down somewhere or transfer it to a password manager before going further, because you'll need this to log in later.
More detailed installation instructions are linked from the main site.
Upgrading from a previous install
To upgrade from version 3 just go to the administrator control panel and select check for updates.