The Freedombox project is working on providing the software and hardware for making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test release (0.2).
And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie, where most of the needed packages used are already present. Only one, the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try to build your own boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts and build using vmdebootstrap with a user with sudo access to become root:
git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \ freedom-maker sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \ mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \ u-boot-tools make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to a race condition in vmdebootstrap, the build might fail without the patch to the kpartx call.
If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load the preseed values:
url=http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
But note that due to a recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie, the installer will currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the 'apt-cdrom ident' process when it hang a few times during the installation will get the installation going. This affect all installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.
Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help us get the new release published. :) Please join us on IRC (#freedombox on irc.debian.org) and the mailing list if you want to help make this vision come true.