Self Hosting Panel
1 Like
I would love to be involved in this panel. I work on FreedomBox, a home server system which aims to make it easy for anyone to host a server at home. FreedomBox is a Debian pure-blend, which means that all of its software comes directly from Debian and that it inherits the security and trust of the Debian ecosystem. Currently, FreedomBox offers 20+ apps and features available through single-click installs, like a chat server, calendar server, file server, blog, VPN, and more. One hardware manufacturer currently sells FreedomBox kits for home users.
As Solid’s ecosystem continues to grow, I’d like to do my part to advocate for cooperation between our two communities. Perhaps, in the future, the FreedomBox system can include a Solid module/app and thereby serve as a “gateway” to the broader Solid ecosystem.
I’m happy to be involved!
7 Likes
@haidar what a great project! I’ve been thinking about the idea of the home based system augmented with online servers for a little while now, there is definitely a lot of overlap between the two. What’s the cheapest box offering available? What are the apps coded in?
There are two ways to acquire a FreedomBox home server: (1) make one by buying your hardware of choice and installing our software on it, or (2) buy an all-inclusive kit with the software preinstalled.
For option (1), you can pick one of about 15 single board computers and install a free OS image here: https://freedombox.org/download/stable/
The cheapest board tends to be the Raspberry Pi 2. But you’re not limited to only those 15 boards for which we build custom images. One of the benefits of being a Debian Pure Blend is that FreedomBox inherits the diverse hardware compatibility of Debian. This means that you can install FreedomBox on most old laptops, netbooks, and desktops. FreedomBox is designed to be hardware neutral: we aim for it to be installable on almost any computer hardware.
For option (2), you can buy a FreedomBox from a company called Olimex. Learn more here: Be a FreedomBox Pioneer | FreedomBox - Personal Server at Home
Quoting directly from our wikipedia page:
“FreedomBox is a Debian Pure Blend. All applications on FreedomBox are installed as Debian packages. The FreedomBox project itself distributes its software through Debian repositories. Depending on Debian for software maintenance is one of the reasons why FreedomBox outlasted many similar projects which used manual installation scripts instead. FreedomBox comes with automatic software updates powered by Debian.”
Thus, our apps are code in multiple languages, as diverse as the languages you’d find in Debian. We don’t discriminate based on code language. What really matters to us is that the app is packaged for Debian.
1 Like
And if my answer to your question wasn’t sufficiently clear, then check out our live demo. It shows you our UI and how we integrate various apps: https://freedombox.org/demo/
1 Like
Hi Danny,
Great to have on the Self Hosting Panel.
Here is a dedicated repo for the panel to work https://github.com/solid/self-hosting-panel Feel free to use it how you see best.
The Solid specification can be found here https://github.com/solid/specification Once you have a proposal developed within the panel this is where you submit a pull request for editorial review. You can read more about the process here https://github.com/solid/process
Mitzi