On today's internet, most of us find ourselves locked into one service provider or the other. We find ourselves tied down to Apple, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft for our e-mail, social networking, calendering -- you name it. It doesn't have to be that way. The FreedomBox Foundation[1] has just released its first commercially available FreedomBox: The Pioneer Edition FreedomBox Home Server Kit[2]. With it, you -- not some company -- control over your internet-based services.
The Olimex[3] Pioneer FreedomBox costs less than a $100 and is powered by a single-board computer (SBC), the open source hardware-based Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 board[4]. This SBC is powered by a 1GHz A20/T2 dual core Cortex-A7 processor and dual-core Mali 400 GPU. It also comes with a Gigabyte of RAM, a high-speed 32GB micro SD card for storage with the FreedomBox software pre-installed, two USB ports, SATA-drive support, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a backup battery.
Doesn't sounds like much does it? But, here's the thing: You don't need much to run a personal server.
Sure, some of us have been running our own servers at home, the office, or at a hosting site for ages. I'm one of those people. But, it's hard to do. What the FreedomBox brings to the table is the power to let almost anyone run their own server without being a Linux expert.
The supplied FreedomBox software is based on Debian Linux[5]. It's designed from