[Hamara-devel] Just Got Raspberry Pi Delivered

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting shirish (2015-10-29 18:16:24)
> On Thursday 29 October 2015 10:31 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Quoting Vikas Tara (2015-10-29 17:20:21)
>>> On 29/10/15 15:16, Gurvinder wrote:
>>>> Raspberry Pi's with official case really looks cool.
>>> Now make it hamara :)
>>
>> Please note that Raspberry Pi 2 cannot run Debian¹.

> While you are sharing, why don't you share the freedombox concept. You 
> could share the concept now and when you come down, you could share 
> the implementation and till where you are with it when you are in 
> Delhi. That might be useful for hamara.
>
> At the very least share the concept. I would just say it is an idea 
> which came from Mr. Eben Moglen in one of his talks some years ago.

I am quite enthusiastic about the core concept Eben Moglen coined as 
"FreedomBox" at his talk¹ at Debconf 2010, which sparked the Debian 
"freedomBox" project and later the US-based non-profit "FreedomBox 
Foundtion" led by Eben Moglen.

That said, I do not agree with the approach taken by those actively 
developing the project (and have no clue what the Foundation is doing): 
What got me involved was the emphasis on non-geeks - i.e. that is was 
basically a server equivalent to "Linux on the desktop" now arguably 
solved by GNOME, KDE, Xfce and (to a lesser extend) other projects.

What I envisioned as the FreedomBox was a box containing a plain 
subset² of Debian - i.e. no new inventions unique to FreedomBox compared 
to Debian in general - usable without system administration at all.

The FreedomBox in the making is a box mandating a uniquely invented 
web-based system administration.

I still help out with the FreedomBox - e.g. tracking relevant boards and 
reminding them that rPi is still not Debian (although newest press 
release indicates that the Foundation indicates don't care about that).

I am involved more actively in a few other projects related to 
FreedomBox - in fact directly inspired by it...

I've developed a tool called "boxer" to help manage which packages to 
include when bootstrapping a system.  I hope to discuss with you when we 
meet (or before here by mail?) if that tool might be suitable for some 
of your work with Hamara.

I've created a few Debian Blends (non-pure, for now) by use of above 
boxer tool:
  * DebianParl - actively used by a small group of pioneers in the 
    European Parliament.
  * DebianDesign - inspired by the need of my partner, Siri, but not
    yet actively used.
  * DebianSugar - part of a project in progress to migrate 500.000 
    XO-1 laptops in Peru from the original OLPC fork of Fedora to 
    Debian.

Siri an I are both involved in the ShowMeBox team to develop a box 
useful for creating data analysis visualizations, planned to be part of 
next Debconf in South Africa: https://wiki.debian.org/ShowMeBox

While travelling in India - in parallel to collaborating with Hamara and 
Swecha and various others - Siri and I will work on ShowMeBox as well, 
and I will bring an OLinuXino LIME2 box for that which I can show you 
when we meet :-)

Sory, I am not the big promotor of FreedomBox specifically, but I hope 
this was inspiring too,

 - Jonas

¹ http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/641

² Some years ago I coined the term "Debian Pure Blend" to describe pure 
subsets of Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends#Terminology

-- 
 * 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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