Install on a Single Board Computer (SBC)

Do this on a separate machine, not the SBC itself

1. Install the dat command

2. Make sure you have the xz command installed

3. Download the image for your SBC. The list of available dat files is here. If your SBC is not supported then you may still be able to install Freedombone if it can run Armbian. Details of installing on Armbian can be found here.

dat clone dat://...
cd [cloned directory]
unxz

4. Plug in a microSD card. You might need an external reader device for this, or many laptops have an SDcard slot via which you can connect a microSD card within an adapter.

5. Find its device name, which usually begins with /dev/sd or /dev/mmcblk. One way of doing this is with the command

ls /dev/sd*

Before and after attaching the microSD drive

6. Now copy the extracted image to the microSD drive. This may take quite a while

sudo dd bs=1M if=freedombone-[your SBC].img of=/dev/sdX conv=fdatasync,sync,noerror

7. You may want to make sure that you use the whole of the available space on the microSD drive, using a tool such as gparted to resize the partition

8. Remove the microSD drive and plug it into the SBC which will be your server

9. Plug your SBC into one of the ethernet sockets on your internet router using a USB patch cable (cat5 or cat6)

10. Make sure that the SBC has a mains power supply. Connect power to then SBC so that it boots

11. Ensure that mDNS/zeroconf is enabled on your internet router. The router settings are often accessed via 192.168.2.1 or 192.168.10.1 or 192.168.1.254

12. If avahi is not available on your laptop (not the Freedombone server) then make sure you install it

On Debian

apt-get install avahi-utils avahi-dnsconfd

On Arch/Parabola

sudo pacman -S avahi nss-mdns
sudo sed -i 's|hosts:.*|hosts: files mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns myhostname|g' /etc/nsswitch.conf

13. Browse the local network with

avahi-browse -at

If eveything is working you should notice that a system called freedombone appears in the list, with a http service

14. Open a web browser which is not a Tor browser and navigate to http://freedombone/admin, or if that doesn't work then try http://freedombone.local/admin

Congratulations! You are now ready to begin setting up the server and installing apps. You will need to have purchased a domain name, and have a dynamic DNS account or equivalent arrangement so that the server domain name is resolvable from the wider internet.