Recently I bought a second hand Pioneer FreedomBox. My aim is to use it as a replacement of on old Mac Mini which is in use as my music-files samba/mediaserver.
Because it’s second hand, I wanted to make a fresh install. First try was downloading the stable-version and ‘dd’ the SD-card. After starting up, waiting, but the webpage on ‘freedombox.local’ didn’t show up. Connecting a monitor, after ‘kernel starting up’ nothing happened anymore.
Second try was downloading the stable with a torrent. The torrent never finished, it kept ‘downloading’ to 99%, dropped to 98% etc.
Next try was to use the bookworm-stable version. This gave no problems, I was able to do the configuring (You are running Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) and FreedomBox version 23.18.). I connected the Freedombox to an USB SDD and tried to install Samba, without succes (… File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/plinth/privileged/packages.py”, line 69, in install raise RuntimeError(RuntimeError: Apt command failed with return code: 100).
First thing to do was checking if the system was up to date. Using Cockpit, to my surprise I saw there were updates available. It surprised me because one of the first steps in configuring is updating the system, which took a lot of time. So, what’s there to update I wondered.
Updating didn’t work, it got stuck in unresolved dependencies. Next step was to use the terminal and do the apt full-upgrade … I had to ‘dd’ the SD-card again
So, now I’m having a running FreedomBox, but it’s not up to date I think, and Samba isn’t running yet.
I have not tried the Debian 13 installer on a Pioneer, there could be an issue on it. However, with the Pioneer and other SBCs, I often had the situation that, after the “kernel starting up” message, nothing shows up on the display anymore, while the SBC is working fine.
The default power supply of the Pioneer is most likely insufficient for any external disk. I purchased the “OSHW server” from Olimex which is a Pioneer with a SATA disk, with the power supply provided by Olimex for it (more current than the one for the Pioneer alone), the disk was regularly unmounted and remounted during long writes (and to a different drive letter). After I used a 5V 5A power supply instead, this problem disappeared.
I have never tried USB, but I suspect it may be the same, so better get a more powerful power supply (like 5V 5A).
My approach is not to use Cockpit, only the basic web interface, and wait several days for updates to occur. The Pioneer is super slow to install updates, and there could be some phasing to trigger them.
That illegal snapshot bothers me the most. I’m going to reinstall again with taking better care of quality of downloaded image.
Experience until now is that if there shows nothing on the terminal anymore, and I can ping the freedombox successfully , the web-interface isn’t available either.
The samba issue, will take care of it when I manage to get the Trixie running.
