Edit: Just wanted to give a shout out to David (cc-ed), who worked with me on exploring/testing the FreedomBox web UI.
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Carlos Cortes <[email protected]> wrote: > 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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