Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
A Freebox (plural Freeboxen) is what I call a free public-access machine running Free Software (hereinafter freeware). It is not a public-access machine running Microsoft monopolyware, nor is it a machine for which an access-fee is charged.
The goals of this project are twofold. The proximal goal is to displace Microsoft and other monopolyware with freeware as much as possible; the underlying and more long-term goal is to encourage people to think that alternatives to global corporate superstate hegemony might exist, and thereby enourage resistance to monopoly capitalism and exploration of different possible futures.
Many people's initial exposure to computers will occur using public-access machines at libraries, cafes and such. This will especially be true for people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, and such access will be the only access for many such people. Currently such access is almost entirely monopolyware. Competing for desktop space on these machines is an effective way to show that resistance is fertile as opposed to futile, and is possible.
If you are interested, drop me a line with my Contact Form.
FREE GEEK recycles used technology and provides computers, education and access to the internet. You can earn a free Linux OS computer in exchange for a few hours of community service. You can help us to repair and recycle computers; we will teach you any skills required.
These folks appear to have done in Euroland precisely what I've been trying for years to do here.
12/2/2001: I'm currently running two freeboxen at the French Broad Food Coop. My present setup is with Debian/unstable, Gnome and Enlightenment, using gdm with my TimedLogin hack as the login manager and Galeon as the default browser. I'm using two different journaling filesystems, xfs and ext3. They both seem to work well. xfs has a much larger ram footprint, so ext3 is maybe a better choice for a desktop machine. Using a journaling fs is highly recommended, as freeboxen are apt to be randomly reset and so forth.
I set up my first freebox at 220.org in '97. It ran for years without maintenance until the hardware rusted out from under it. It was heavily used and quite popular. The technical issues were not difficult; it was doable with an ancient redhat (something like 5.1) on a 486 with 16MB ram, and a proxied net connection.(1/2/2001) I made enquiries in the local (Transylvania County, NC, USA) library. I was quite pleased that the person in charge of the public-access M$ machines there had actually heard of Free Software and Linux. I was unsurprised that she could not at present turn a machine over to me, tho' she was interested and said it might at some point be possible. She explained that the machines were grant-funded, and the grants were quite detailed and restrictive. Additionally, she informed me that the Gates Foundation was giving them some more machines (pursuing the same strategy I am, but with a few tens of billions of dollars more muscle behind it), which were of course restricted to running M$.
I hacked gdm to allow what is called TimedLogin, and this was picked up in official gdm2. This mechanism logs in a given user after a timeout. Users with individual accouts can login using gdm, but the machine will go from power-up to running desktop with the default user logged in without intervention. For Freebox use, an interesting further modification might be to create an anonymous temporary login, which would be created anew with each instantiation, and wiped on logout. This will result in no state information being saved, providing privacy and identical function to each successive user.
My interest in Free Software as a whole is not that it is Neat Stuff, or that I can read the source, but rather that it is the most visible and successful instantiation of a socioeconomic model other than the monopoly capitalism which is now so dominant; it is one of the few areas of activity in which global mopolist hegemony is not sweeping all before it. So my interest is not so much in the software itself, but rather the effect the use of the software has on the users.
I'm using Linux as shorthand for: Hurd/*BSD/Linux/Anything-else-GPL. I have no particular attachment to Linux per se. If rms had placed pragmatic concerns of euphonious pronounceability over his idosyncratic brand of hacker humor, I'd be calling my box a {s/GNU/something-cool-sounding/g} box. In fact I suggested as much to him at length some years back, and pointed out that Gnome, while still having the annoying 'gn' thing, was considerably more 'marketable' than GNU/Linux, and that he might do well to try to get people running Gnome to call it a Gnome box instead of fighting a losing battle for his beloved GNU. The fact is, I run Gnome+Enlightenment+X, and unless I start twiddling with the system, what's under the hood doesn't really matter. My desktop would look and act about the same on anything that supports glibc and X.
I've been using the term 'freebox' for some years. I don't know if I coined it, but it is now used for all sorts of things. See Google Search for examples. I could show prior art back to about mid '97, I think.
It seems that the public-access desktop space is in a period of rapid expansion. Whoever has this (currently M$) is getting all that free crucial initial-contact exposure. People tend to stick with whatever they've learned (example: the Mac/M$ divide): M$ giving their stuff to schools is just free advertising for them. I continue to believe that at present the most effective tactic to further the goal of capturing overall 'market share' from M$ is in somehow capturing this free-public-access space in libraries, community centers, etc. That I don't know how to do: I just know how to set up a bomb-proof Linux browser machine.