Hands On Want to get off someone else’s cloud, especially if it’s hosted in a country you don’t trust? FreedomBox is an off-ramp, and it’s included in Debian in the form of a Blend.
The FreedomBox project, kicked off by original FSF legal boffin Eben Moglen, aims to make it easy to run your own private server, and get your files, photos, email, and other data out of the enfolding pseudopodia of giant cloud providers (mostly based in the USA) and into your own home. You can buy hardware with the software preinstalled, or download installation media, but there’s another and maybe more appealing option: one of Debian’s built-in Blends.
In the default Debian ISO image, down at the bottom of the installation program’s screen asking if you want a desktop environment and if so which one, there’s another option which conceals a catalog of "Blends" – pre-selected bundles of software to install along with the Debian OS. Debian’s own site calls these Pure Blends and offers both a lengthy manual if you’re a linear sort of reader, and also a wiki page if you’re more inclined to jump around the place leaving a trail of browser tabs.
Most of the Blends are aimed at someone installing a workstation for some specific function or audience, such as a particular science or hobby; there are also Blends to increase Debian’s accessibility, one for FOSS gaming, and one aimed at kids. These are all essentially bundles of handy apps – no bad thing, and a model proved by Ubuntu Studio and EduBuntu among others.
The FreedomBox Blend, though, is something different. It turns a new empty Debian installation into a FreedomBox server, ready for you to configure and use. It installs and enables a web-management front-end called Plinth, and most of the rest of the setup is done in there. (It also installs and configures an LDAP server, which seems slightly overkill to us. We suppose that you could use this to keep several FreedomBoxes’ user accounts automatically in sync.)
The Plinth web-admin homepage with just one app: the Cockpit system-management tool - Click to enlarge