FreedomBox: The Home Server Appliance

Speakers: Sunil Mohan Adapa James Valleroy

Track: Debian Blends and Debian derived distributions

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Talks

Time: Aug 26 (Wed): 19:00

Duration: 0:45

FreedomBox, the pure blend to bring Debian to home servers, has had a productive year. In collaboration with Olimex, an OSHW manufacturer, we have launched FreedomBox home server kits that users can buy and set up at home. This move saw a significant increase in user participation in the project.

We have made a lot of progress so far in FreedomBox - simplified user experience, easy to acquire hardware, automatic configuration, well-managed security and a sizeable number of apps to wean us off of the proprietary surveillance-based cloud services we have come to depend on.

We have quite a few plans for the coming year. We want to improve our hardware offering by working with Olimex and also reach out to potential new partners. We will try to add some features such as Audio/Video conferencing, crucial missing apps and even prepare FreedomBox for NAS use cases at home while getting ready for a solid Bullseye release.

This talk discusses the progress of the project over the last year, what has been achieved as part of the bigger picture, our plans for the coming year and how the larger Debian community can contribute to the effort.