Amahi LHS

We have some quick Amahi Linux Home Server updates:

• Version 0.88 of the platform software, with new and improved support for themes, not only in the dashboard, set up and platform screens, but also incorporates a “theme server” for other apps, so that changing the theme in the platform settings can change the theme across apps. This version also contains some minor stability improvements.
• Version 0.25 of the webcal app (the one showing the calendars through a web interface), is now using the theme server in the base Amahi platform to get part of it’s look and feel.
• We have been working hard on improving the general usability of the Amahi web site.
  1. We have added the capability to send feedback to us directly from your amahi.org account (we got some already!). This is a great way to submit questions to the FAQ!
  2. Completely streamlined and interactive set of step-by-step instructions. Many of the new users have followed them already and you guys have provided good feedback on it. The wiki instructions for install will be phased out over time.
  3. FAQ Questions in the FAQ Categories are now collapsed, since they were getting too big. You can go one by one or just search the page for the topic you are interested in!
• Things coming up: a configuration wizard to let you configure your HDA(s) without sending email to support, easier navigation and account preferences. … And we have not forgotten about the infamous “error 22″ …

We wanted to give a Great Big Thanks to Gairy Spiers, who has been relentlessly helping out in various areas!

One thing that he did is write a How-To on how to do automatic periodic backups from Windows XP machines to the HDA. Hit the image to see the How-To.



Not only that, Gairy has also been working on promotional banners for Amahi, which we will talk about soon, and working on the first real theme for the Amahi dashboard. He was also instrumental in getting the WeightWatcher app back in shape (pardon the pun). More about these two topics soon!

In the mean time, many thanks to Gairy!

We would like it if you all contributed to the Amahi wiki documenting your insightss in the areas you are most experienced in for the benefit of the other users!

Carlos

We could simply not help it but add support for MediaRSS, and by extension for PicLens, a spectacular client for MediaRSS (and more) to our Amahi SlideShow app the moment we saw PicLens in action!

Here is a screenshot of the PicLens wall with some photos (click on the picture to see a large version).

Even the large screenshot does not do justice to how powerful the slideshow that PicLens provides is!

PicLens is a browser add-on for navigating pictures in a very immersive way. Go ahead and install it!

SlideShow is an Amahi Linux Home Server plug-in app (one of the few that we have well documented in the wiki) that displays the pictures in your pictures folder via a web browser, in a slideshow format, with (AJAX) screen effects, etc.

This week we learned about CoolIris and saw one of it’s flagship products, PicLens, in action. The visuals provided by PicLens are simply stunning (some people get dizzy since it’s so immersive)! With a side scrolling mouse, it’s truly an experience!

A slick video from CoolIris should help illustrate the features better. For SlideShow, in addition of Google/Flickr/YouTube/etc., by default it launches you into your pictures when you are at the SlideShow app:

We have tested it with our set of home pictures (over 15000 pictures, 14GB+ in all), and it performed very well, with our HDA generating the thumbnails at a rate of 2 a second, and serving them off the cache (in subsequent browses) at 400 thumbnails/second for the PicLens wall! Pheeeewwww!

Install PicLens and hit your HDA with the update, though if you have automatic update running already (as well you should! ), you should have it ready to install in your My Apps screen by now!

Just be careful: do not get too dizzy with PicLens and do not drool on your keyboard!

Here are the release notes:

• Version 0.22 of SlideShow released, simultaneously with version 0.86 of the platform software
• Platform v0.86 provides support for Amahi apps to insert their on links in the head of the pages
• SlideShow automatically exports and makes available a MediaRSS feed for the media in your HDA’s pictures folder.
• At the moment it’s all one long feed, which displays as a long wall in PicLens. Albums is something that over time will get more and more support, no doubt, since it’s a must when handling such an immersive experience. Same thing with hierarchical folders of pictures, which we use fairly extensively
• SlideShow v0.22 will automatically generate thumbnails for the MediaRSS links as they are requested by the client. This is very slick. It keeps the thumbnails in a cache in /tmp/, so they will stay there for a while, then flushed. Needless to say, depending on the speed of your HDA, the initial loading can be fast or slow (my HDA is not too fast - an Athlon 2500 at 1.8MHz and it was useable).
• No support for video yet or the other more fancy features like background music, etc.

Please report any issues you may encounter with these updates!

Carlos

Here is a quick Amahi Linux Home Server update on new package releases. Some of it was to improve on the out of the box experience, and some of it is for overall stability and feature improvements.

• Version 2.3 of hdactl fixed creation of default samba shares (this has been a long standing issue). This will make the user experience out of the box for ffile sharing better, avoiding having to mess with.
• Version 0.10 of hda-suite to include dependency of the system-config-samba rpm. This will also help for people configure samba, so that the Fedora config utility is there when you use the desktop (directly or via vnc).
• Version 2.4 of hdactl, which fixes permissions of the files in the samba shares. This is something that came today, after we realized that the 2.3 version may leave samba shares owned by root. New installs will just work. For people that have this already and pick it up via automatic updates (everyone, by default), we recommend you chown your /var/hda/files to whatever you need … otherwise do
  rpm -e --nodeps hdactl && yum -y install hdactl
• Version 0.21 of the wiki theme to improve install reliability.
• Version 0.85 of the platform software (dashboard, setup, etc.). This improves speeding in the web server and also speeding in the restart of the web server. Not only that, it also fixes an issue with having to reinstall apps and restarting the server afterwards to see them properly. This is no longer necessary!

There are a couple of other updates, dealing with the weightwatcher app, which we’ll send separately, and the http://www.amahi.org site. Note that we’re still working on the web manager for the platform to let you very easily install { wordpres | drupal | munin | phphmyadmin
| zenphoto, etc.}.

More soon!

Watching the home networking space is interesting. The whole space is exploding, many people approaching it in many different ways.

We hope to have a good approach with the Amahi Linux Home Server. We wanted to recap a bit a few interesting links we have been gathering.

Education on Home Networking

One thing most people realize is that enthusiasts and “DIYers” have an edge: education.
So, for instance, Sony spends some nice effort educating US customers and potential customers through their Backstate101 site. They have a large number of tutorials and courses. Take for instance this excellent online course on advanced home networking. It is particularly thorough and informative. Here are the lessons:

1. Advanced Networking: basic infrastructure, like setting up a client/server configuration (that’s our interest!), wiring (ethernet, power line networking, hubs), sharing printers, etc.
2. Advanced Network Security: protecting your network, firewalls, testing your setup for security, etc.
3. Wireless networking: all about wireless
4. Advanced topics: remote access/VPN, hosting a web server or email server, distributing audio and video, etc.

It covers a whole range of networking topics fairly deeply. Here are other home networking tutorials. They are sprouting everywhere!

Growth!

The projections in the humming home networking space are periodically pouring in. This one from Parks Associates, indicates home networking worldwide will reach 170 million units in 2006.

Home networking penetration worldwide is predicted to increase nearly 50 percent from 2006 to 2008, reaching to almost 170 million units by the end of 2008 from 114 million in 2006

According to Parks Associates’ white paper “Europe: Home Network Update”, service provider-led deployments of residential gateway solutions, particularly in Europe drive the growth of households with data networking solutions for broadband and file sharing. Amid aggressive competition, European broadband providers will have deployed residential gateways to more than 16 million households by the end of 2008, up from 11 million at year-end 2007.

Online Media and Home Networking

Check this one out. A nice fellow got to find out the hard way that apparently Comcast limits monthly downloads at the highest speed to *cough* 384GB *cough*. Not bad. After that, you get some slowdown. For the geeks out there, 384 is, of course, 256 + 128, a nice round number. Clearly, the next slowdowns come at 448GB and then 480GB

Trying to harden backup tools is hard. The reason is that there are so many possible configurations that may be used by the customer that it’s impossible to test them all.

We have been trying to chase down one particular issue, called “error 22″, which happens occasionally when trying to back up NTFS disks.

One thing we were thinking it could be happening is that the NTFS disk subject to the backup has not been shut down properly. Being a journalling file system, this is ok, however, the tool we use in PBA for backing up NTFS partitions (ntfsclone), cannot handle disks improperly shutdown.

As usual, please only test (recovery of) PBA backups with e.g. alternate disks, keeping the original safe (i.e. not with real data). And report back, including if you have positive experiences, to build up confidence in the tool. We have no reports of failures so far, but you never know.