Hi, I attended the Hackathon today, and it was the first time that I was coming into contact with FreedomBox in a meaningful way. I ran FreedomBox on Virtualbox from the distributed image (trivial) and experimented with the web UI as a new user. I have included my notes on the experience below in the hope that some rough edges may be identified as opportunities for improvement. It was a pleasure getting the opportunity to meet other members of the FreedomBox community and dev team.
Cheers, Carlos ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Observations related to initial installation 1. virtio kernel panic on virtualbox Kernel Panic when using network adapter type 'virtio' on VirtualBox 2. VBox Guest Additions VBox guest additions installation fails because freedombox doesn't have X installed. Might want to make a mention of this on VBox install page since it is so commonly used. 3. nmap command in documentation The nmap command from doc didn't work for finding IP of freedombox since the SFLC office doesn't use 192.168.x.x. Did the appropriate thing for the network actually in use (10.5.53.x), but perhaps that section of the doc could be expanded to figure out more effectively the IP of the machine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Experience on First Login to FreedomBox Feedback on the initial user experience.. this is all based on signing in for the first time and investigating the various applications that can be enabled. 0. Self-signed certificate Warning First time you access FreedomBox you get certificate warning from Firefox. (ie self-signed cert) Documentation doesn't make any comment about this being ok or not, which may scare some users. 1. Minor Typo: evertime -> every time Old: Your ISP does not provide you a static IP address and your IP address changes evertime you connect to Internet. 2. Guiding user to next action on PageKite page There are various tabs on this page: - About PageKite - Configure PageKite - Standard Services - Custom Services .. as well as the button 'Configure PageKite'. However, clicking any of those results in the same message being displayed to user: "Install PageKite packages" (approx). It would be better perhaps if there was a single button to install without any other superfluous items. That would guide the user to the next step. 3. Install Shaarli results in hanging UI, no feedback Clicked on 'Install' button for Shaarli, and then decided to go click some other links. The interface doesn't respond, and appears to be hanging. If you reload the 'Install' page, you don't get any feedback on what is actually happening. Not very good from user experience perspective. Some feedback on what is happening would be helpful. It did eventually come back quite a while later. 4. Error when installing Dynamic DNS Clicking install resulted in the following error: Error installing packages: E: http://httpredir.debian.org sid/main amd64 Packages is not (yet) available () I then went to terminal and explicitly did a 'apt-get install ez-ipupdate' and that worked. Purged the package and went back to the interface, and clicked 'Install' button again. It worked. Don't know why. 5. http://freedombox.local doesn't work after initial setup I was able to successfully access the mDNS address for plinth on the first attempt when I was required to provide a username & password for main login. When I tried to use that address again following that step so that I could log in for the first time, I could not reach freedombox.local. I worked around this by determining IP from CLI and then accessing the web interface by IP. 6. PageKite App activation The 'pagekite' app activation page should tell you that you must sign up separately for the service. Some people might not realize this. It might not be obvious to folks that 'Kite Secret' and "pagekite.net password" are not the same thing. Not realizing this resulted in some wasted time. It would be helpful if some information from the logs could be presented in order to help the user determine why an error occurred. The pagekite log contained information on 'authentication failed' but that was not exposed on the web page. Is it required that you create a sub-kite, or should the root kite work? The connection only seemed to occur successfully for a sub-kite. Meaning: foo.pagekite.me doesn't work, but bar-foo.pagekite.me works. 7. Dynamic DNS Activation/Configuration Created an account on afraid.org and proceeded to configure Dynamic DNS app. The configuration files that were written to /etc/ez-ipupdate/ did not seem to have correct data and how to debug this was quite not obvious. Admittedly, I didn't dig deep into plinth code for this, but I'm not sure whether that's what you expect normal users to do.
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