This is what i needed

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Overall Impressions

What i liked

  • What impressed me a lot is that FreedomBox can run on my 15< years old office pc, which has 32bit single core 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 and 2GB DDR1 memory.
    Now i use it on almost identical office pc, but with 64bit 2core 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 and 2GB DDR2 memory, and it works FLAWLESSLY.
    24/7 Matrix for 3 ppl, Deluge with 130+ constant-seeding torrents, samba and shared net folder.

  • Setup was really easy. Nothing to add here.

  • Automated Matrix installation saves a looot of time. And it works. Really cool.

  • Automated Let’s Encrypt.

What i disliked

  • It wasn’t a huge problem, but mounting additional drives could be easier(i had to go into fstab)

  • It would be helpful to see a tip where “shared” folder is. Took me some time to figure this out.

  • What i really miss is admin options for Matrix. I can’t see how many ppl are on the server, can’t clean up empty rooms, etc…
    I found this https://github.com/xwiki-labs/synapse_scripts but have no idea how to use it.

  • No option for deleting/reinstalling apps. A couple of days ago i tried to set remote user for Deluge. I added new user in “auth” file in .config, it worked, but for some reason completely broke seeding. :x Hopefully apt remove/install fixed it. God be praised. It saved me another hard reset. (I had to reinstall a couple of times, but it was due to my mistakes)

Improvement suggestion

  • It would be super cool if users could upload files, not only read/download.

  • There is a plugin in Nextcloud that adds media player. It would be nice to stream music instead of downloading it through shared folder.

  • Also, something like Standard Notes would be cool.

Summary

  • I have switched to Linux ~2 months ago and was able to set everything up. I really admire how a lot of things are automated. Truly awesome distro. Thank you.

Stay safe,

Mateda

Bonus pic :smiley:

IMG_20200329_174651
IMG_20200329_1746511548Ă—2064 1.29 MB

2 Likes
2

Thanks for taking the time to write about your experience using FreedomBox. It is very encouraging to read this.

There are some near-term improvements being planned to improve the experience of using FreedomBox with multiple hard drives and also to some of the file sharing apps.

I wasn’t aware about the admin options for Matrix Synapse. Thanks for bringing this up.

You can stream music from a shared Samba folder or Sharing app folder. The trick is to open the music files in a media player that can stream over the network. VLC and MPlayer derivatives like SMPlayer and MPV can do this.

I have been writing most of my notes in MediaWiki these days.
I have earlier tried BoostNote and Joplin with the notes directory stored in a Syncthing folder.