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I bought a FB in March 2023. My FB is plugged into a router at home. I can’t access the FB web page so I plan to download the software to a new micro SD, and start over. ALSO, should I delete the settings for FB currently on my router? Thaks for any assistance.
Whether your FreedomBox is plugged into a router at home or not (if not, please specify how it is connected to the internet)
The month and year you bought your kit (feel free to omit if you want to preserve some privacy, but this could be helpful information)
The version of FreedomBox your are running (available by clicking on the “?” in the top menu → “About”)
The download page on the FreedomBox wiki includes URLs to images for supported target hardware. It sounds like you have a FreedomBox Pioneer Edition, for which the Olimex product page includes a URL to the download directory containing files for the current stable image and its signature. Unfortunately, the date of those files (2022-01-28), the same files the wiki leads you to, indicates they’re for the previous stable version of Debian (bullseye), not the current stable version (bookworm).
You could try the files under nightly (with a date of 2023-07-01), which which should be based on bookworm even if they’re not completely current.
This sounds like the same issue (can’t access the FB webpage) that you describe in another thread, where you mention that you can access the FB from the command line. I posted a few questions on that thread. If your FB is booting successfully, maybe the problem isn’t with the SD card.
to check for updates? You could be on an older version trying to update where it will give you a 500 error when trying to connect to plinth. Do you get an error when trying to connect or does it just fail?
My original FB is running the stable version from the download page: Download | FreedomBox - Personal Server at Home , while the others I just added the FB software via the Debian repos after a fresh base installation.
What’s new is that I can no longer get to the FB at all. Previously, I could not get to the FB web interface but was able to use the command line. NOW, I can’t access FB at all. The router cannot ping the FB. So, I’m going to give it another shot and start all over. Eventually, I will get this working. With help, I learn something new every time. Thanks for your time. Much appreciated.
Thank you for the response. The micro SD card may not have been the problem but I the problem today (Sept 20, 2023) is that I did create a new micro SD card using the balenaetcher program for my Mac OS machine from the Olimex bookworm image. So, I turned off the FreedomBox power, disconnected the ethernet cable from the FB to the router, inserted the new micro SD card into the FB, reconnected the cable to the router, powered up the FB, waited 30 minutes and still no connection from the FB to the router. I checked the online and offline devices on the router. I also tried to connect from the browser (“freedombox.local” and “admin@freedombox” and “admin@[freedombox-IP address-OLD”] without success. If I used the MacOS terminal command line program (which I successfully had in the past before the new installation) even if there was a connection, I could not enter a password because I had not yet set up a new admin username and password for the new installation. (if there was a way to save the old admin name and password, I had not done it).
So, I would very much appreciate any help **how to use balenaetcher program on a Mac OS machine to download and install FreedomBox bookworm OR FreedomBox bullseye software.
Yes it happened after the bookworm update. Eventually, I tried to flash a new micro SD card as follows:
Thank you for the response. The micro SD card may not have been the problem but I the problem today (Sept 20, 2023) is that I did create a new micro SD card using the balenaetcher program for my Mac OS machine from the Olimex bookworm image. So, I turned off the FreedomBox power, disconnected the ethernet cable from the FB to the router, inserted the new micro SD card into the FB, reconnected the cable to the router, powered up the FB, waited 30 minutes and still no connection from the FB to the router. I checked the online and offline devices on the router. I also tried to connect from the browser (“freedombox.local” and “admin@freedombox” and “admin@[freedombox-IP address-OLD”] without success. If I used the MacOS terminal command line program (which I successfully had in the past before the new installation) even if there was a connection, I could not enter a password because I had not yet set up a new admin username and password for the new installation. (if there was a way to save the old admin name and password, I had not done it).
So, I would very much appreciate any help how to use balenaetcher program on a Mac OS machine to download and install FreedomBox bookworm OR FreedomBox bullseye software.
Thank you for the response. The micro SD card may not have been the problem but I the problem today (Sept 20, 2023) is that I did create a new micro SD card using the balenaetcher program for my Mac OS machine from the Olimex bookworm image. So, I turned off the FreedomBox power, disconnected the ethernet cable from the FB to the router, inserted the new micro SD card into the FB, reconnected the cable to the router, powered up the FB, waited 30 minutes and still no connection from the FB to the router. I checked the online and offline devices on the router. I also tried to connect from the browser (“freedombox.local” and “admin@freedombox” and “admin@[freedombox-IP address-OLD”] without success. If I used the MacOS terminal command line program (which I successfully had in the past before the new installation) even if there was a connection, I could not enter a password because I had not yet set up a new admin username and password for the new installation. (if there was a way to save the old admin name and password, I had not done it).
So, I would very much appreciate any help how to use balenaetcher program on a Mac OS machine to download and install FreedomBox bookworm OR FreedomBox bullseye software.
I did not change any settings in the router. I had my FB connected to the router before the bookworm update. My FB is the pioneer FB from March 2023. What I deleted before trying a new micro SD card installation was the “freedombox” listed item from the list of online and offline devices on the router.
Here is my current situation with the new SD card installation:
Thank you for the response. The micro SD card may not have been the problem but I the problem today (Sept 20, 2023) is that I did create a new micro SD card using the balenaetcher program for my Mac OS machine from the Olimex bookworm image. So, I turned off the FreedomBox power, disconnected the ethernet cable from the FB to the router, inserted the new micro SD card into the FB, reconnected the cable to the router, powered up the FB, waited 30 minutes and still no connection from the FB to the router. I checked the online and offline devices on the router. I also tried to connect from the browser (“freedombox.local” and “admin@freedombox” and “admin@[freedombox-IP address-OLD”] without success. If I used the MacOS terminal command line program (which I successfully had in the past before the new installation) even if there was a connection, I could not enter a password because I had not yet set up a new admin username and password for the new installation. (if there was a way to save the old admin name and password, I had not done it).
So, I would very much appreciate any help how to use balenaetcher program on a Mac OS machine to download and install FreedomBox bookworm OR FreedomBox bullseye software.
Once you have your card ready, your FB powered up and running for a bit, login to your router & find the ip address of your FB. Then try to connect to it as I posted previously.
After downloading the latest Freedоmbox nightly image, you need to unzip it first, and then flash it to the sd card with balenaEtcher. As silly as it sounds in a hurry I’ve made the mistake of flashing it without unzipping and waited well over half an hour until I got the hang of it. Then you go into the router’s settings and check what the IP address of the Freedombox is (example: 192.168.0.14). You dial it and only then start waiting for the installation.
Not the image. When you download it, it is .xz archive, approx 600MB. Extract it with 7-zip (Download) and then flash the image (approx 3,8GB). As I said, it sounds very silly, but somehow you might miss that step.
EDIT: If you look in the page for Pioneer, under “stable” you get Debian 11 indeed but if you look anywhere else it is Debian 12. See below.
My previous suggestion was to use the stable image for the Olimex Olinuxino Lime 2 at A20 OLinuXino Lime 2 | FreedomBox - Personal Server at Home (it is Debian 12) patched with u-boot for the Pioneer that I compiled and provided at https://metani.fr/share/uboot/ (the Pioneer is an Olimex Olinuxino Lime 2 but the images labelled “Olimex Olinuxino Lime 2” are assuming older board revisions while newer revisions as available in Pioneer have an ethernet controller that does not work with them, so the patch is needed, I hope it is eventually integrated).
I just checked on a Mac computer, you can uncompress the .xz file just by right click in Finder and open in the Apple Archive Utility app. For flash, dd works in a terminal.
To flash the image on a microSD card on your Mac computer:
identify the device with diskutil list. Your device name is something like /dev/diskX where X is a digit. If you use a USB micro SD card reader, run this before inserting and after, then you see the device that is there after and was not there before. You can also use the disk size information provided to identify the device properly. Be careful, if you pick the wrong device you will overwrite one of your disks.
in the directory where there is the uncompressed file, run sudo dd if=freedombox-bookworm_a20-olinuxino-lime2-armhf.img of=/dev/diskX where X is replaced by the correct digit. It takes a while. Then run sync
in the directory where there is u-boot (filename u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin) run sudo dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/devX bs=1024 seek=8 where X is replaced by the correct digit. Then run sync
Now your microSD card is ready. I did not make the flashing on the Mac but I took exactly the same files and tested it on a Pioneer and it worked perfectly well.
Since the topic is in pioneer support, the instructions I have written apply to pioneer edition. The only image in the images of pioneer edition with Debian 12 is in the nightly folder. I know all the other stable images are with Debian 12, but that is not the case for pioneer.
Did you already use a nightly image for Pioneer? I thought a stable image would be safer (this is why I used the stable image for Olimex Olinuxino Lime 2, which is from June 2023 and using Debian 12) but maybe the nightly are fine.
I’m currently using it and it’s going well (as far as I can tell). I reinstalled the system a week ago. My previous install was a stable Debian 11 upgraded to Debian 12. Their behavior on my configuration is the same. In both cases, I have a problem with random system hangs that I can’t resolve, but I’ve patched the situation with wachdog, which restarts it automatically when a problem occurs. Everything else seems pretty stable. I agree it’s about time the Pioneer images were updated now too. I don’t know why they haven’t yet. I’m guessing it has something to do with olimex doing their own updates for Debian 12. But the way I look at it, that’s not going to happen any time soon.
