Amahi got a cease and desist notice from Apple. It’s about the confusion that the “unauthorized use” of the English term app store causes in Amahi’s web site (click the image for the 2-page letter).

After the first shock, the questions start to emerge, like … What!? … or … why Amahi?

Long story short, Apple has to show they are defending a trademark claim they have on that term. Microsoft filed a motion to oppose that trademark claim in January, among other things stating that the two words separately are generic[1], that the 2-word term is also generic in English, that it’s widely used by consumers, by the press and in the software industry to refer to the many app stores available today, and that even Steve Jobs used it in a generic way to refer to other app stores. All possible reasons to not grant the claim. Later, Amazon launched their Appstore for Android in March, and Apple filed a lawsuit against Amazon. Here is an article with a brief history of the claimed trademark. Update: apparently, Nokia is also contesting the mark in Europe.

Then … Why Amahi? Why pick on such a small target when there are so many people using the app store term? Amahi is a Open Source startup, and is not even in the mobile space. We may never know …

We’re still trying to determine what is the best course of action (Update: we have started complying by rotating the term with the top contributions), however, this looks like a rather heavy handed move. Amahi being literally nothing next to Apple (sigh) we do not have the resources to fight this battle. Instead, we’re holding a

» Name the Store Contest «

We’d like it if you submit your suggestion for a term to use for Amahi’s store area, in every language on the surface of the earth, except of course using the term “app store.” Keep them short! We will use one of the top suggestions to name that area of our site. Even if yours does not get picked, you can still win one Plug Computer or one year of Amahi Pro membership. The team will randomly pick two winners among those submitting names, posting Facebook/Twitter posts/comments in that page. Keep it clean and fun!

To commemorate the occasion, we have released a new app called Amahi Invaders that you can install in your HDA (and you can play online too). Hope you enjoy!

Lend your hand to this effort!

• Share this post with your friends in Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Mashable, Slashdot, Reddit, and all your favorite social media or tech news site
• Translate this post to your language and distribute it in tech web sites and media in your area. Update: we have overviews/translations to a few other languages (thanks guys!)
• Contact us if you know of current or prior use of the term “app store,” particularly before June 2008
• Contact us if you have a great testimonial or brand to support Amahi, we’d like to feature it!

Finally, on a personal note, Amahi has been a labor of love that started as a hobby and it has evolved into a healthy community of enthusiasts and a budding startup around the project. As much as I respect Apple, I believe the term “app store” as we have been using it is generic of a store to buy apps, or descriptive, a very weak category of mark, if at all. I hope that Apple will not be entitled to monopolize the term after the litigation goes through. It’s nice to see that Amazon (and Microsoft) are bringing a strong challenge to the Apple claim.

Now back to work on much-needed improvements to our store!

Thanks to you for all the support you have been giving Amahi!

Carlos, for the Amahi Team

——

[1] What is a “generic name”?

A generic term is one used by much of the public to refer to a class or category of product or service. A generic name can not be protected or registered as a trademark or service mark. For example, no one seller can have trademark rights in “telephone” or “oven.” If a seller did have exclusive rights to call something by its recognized name, it would amount to a practical monopoly on selling that type of product. Even established trademarks can lose their protection if they are used generically: thermos and escalator are famous examples.

Legalese. All trademarks mentioned in this post are the property of their respective owners. There, we said it.

This Express CD Train has taken a little longer on it’s route but we’re happy to announce that after lengthy development and testing the Amahi 6.1 Express CD is ready for widespread release!

Download!

Like all things, great products take time. The bittorrent and dowload mirror’s have been seeded and it’s ready to roll. So hit it hard, hit it often, and let your good times roll! Many kudos for Rod Waldren and Solomon for this smallest release ever and one of the most problem-free ever!

If you are new to Amahi, the Express CD is the shortest, fastest, easiest way to install Amahi. It erases your entire PC and makes it a headless Amahi 6.1 HDA (Home Digital Assistant) in a flash.

If you can spare the resources, please seed the torrents for an easier download in our server. Last time we brought the servers to their knees, however, this time we hope they will survive!

Live Apps Updates!

We’ve verified more apps and they made it to live status! Namely the world renowned and rock solid torrent downloader Transmission is ready to rock and roll just in time for you to use to download the Express CD! Then you can check out your system’s logs with one of Peter’s (pjcrux) personal favorites LogAnalyzer.

Lets not forget the importance of scheduling with iCalendar. While you’re waiting .. play some PHPYahtzee. If you’re train is going to be awhile still hit up the CMS app of Family-Connections. Got questions with pressing answer? No worries! Try the PHPMyFAQ app to solve your woes!

We are working on a program to verify apps faster and more reliably. This is critical in keeping the load of bug reports on the community manageable. Stay tuned …

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

App Store and Subscription Plans

First, an update on the transition from our former App Gallery to the Amahi App Store.  With all the feedback we got, we expect to more formally announce the App Store and it’s details soon. In the mean time, we started testing by adding a small one-click convenience fee to some of the more popular apps that the community feels would be worthwhile, generating revenue for the project. This is so far working well and we are getting both positive feedback and feedback on how to improve/tweak things.

We also started subscription plans, which have been well received. As it happens, one of the core team members (cpg) suffered a fire at home (no major casualties), now really coming to appreciate first-hand the need for off-site secure storage of critical files. Was this a message from above?

We are happy to report that after the initial spike in support load, this transition has been  successful and we thank you all for the great support shown! We look forward to improving features on these fronts soon!

New Amahi Ready™ Partner!

We’re constantly thinking of ways to create a successful ecosystem around Amahi. Today we’re happy to announce our newest Amahi Ready™ partner! / kosa crta / (“cosa cherta”) is a Croatian-region distributor of VIA Embedded ultra compact form factor, rugged and fan-less embedded systems. kosa crta recommends and ships Amahi Ready VIA M’SERV S2100 64-bit energy-efficient, large storage capacity, compact, low-noise mini server. Check out their special promotion to Amahi Facebook users! They have even created a few install videos.

Amahi 6.1

It’s been quite a while since our last blog post announcing Amahi 6.0. While we have been delinquent on the news,  there have been many developments within Amahi in a few areas! We have released Amahi 6.1 (technically, 6.1.1). If you have Amahi 6, the update is automatic by default, so you are probably enjoying this release already. Check out the Amahi 6.1 release notes. The big ticket items are stability fixes for the platform and apps, initial support for Ubuntu/Debian platform and right-to-left languages like Arabic (thanks to Abdulrhman Al-Khamees!) and Hebrew (Ashi Carmel!). Also included are Latvian (Ivo!), Croatian (Vladimir!) and updates to Russian and Finnish. Awesome job from the community!

Did Someone say Ubuntu?!?

We are also very happy to announce the amazing Alpha Zero release of Amahi Ubuntu Edition!

It’s been no secret that the desire for an Amahi Ubuntu Edition has been strong for a long time. Commitment was critical in the face of complexity. We slowly added support for Ubuntu for a while and now have Frans (aka eFfeM), a very dedicated developer who was willing to lead on this sizable task, taking time to understand the intricacies and leading it past the goal of an Alpha Zero release for testers!

A few people are rumored to be running Amahi 6 on Ubuntu in development mode and are starting to test the platform and even apps! If you like to test and report bugs, please install it and join us in debugging and improving it!

This has been a long road, and we have still quite a long road ahead. We’re calling it Alpha Zero for a reason

Please join me in saying many thanks to the development team, especially to eFfeM, cale, SolaR and cpg for their contributions (if you see them in IRC give’em a hug or buy’em a beer)!

What’s up with Apps!? And the Express CD?

Our mothers used to say that “It’s the little things that make people happy” .. and we couldn’t agree more. Conversely, some little things are big when it comes to turn people off. When an app does not install or does not work well is a great turn off. This is a huge deal for Amahi, because we disappoint people when things do not work, and that makes them speak bad about their Amahi experience. It takes detailed attention from our contributors and our testmasters to validate and bulletproof apps.

Here is what we’re doing to be more efficient at validating apps: we keep track of failures and we try to tackle the top issues. We are working on automatic app testing, which will ease the job of the team and leverage the (so far dormant) tester program. Expect to hear some news on this front soon as we believe we have a lead for the tester program. By focusing the team we believe we can package and release apps faster.

What about the Express CD? Hmmm, yes … we produced one version (Alpha 1) that was a dud. It did not work well. We have another version in the works that is rumored to run well. Many thanks for the contributions in this area to Solomon (aka slm499) and Rod Waldren!

App Updates

We now have a few apps verified and live as one-click apps, like

• A very very nice Tiny To Do app which is a slick and interactive to-do list manager
• The all-new VNC (a remote desktop app), which works out of the box
• The good old Gallery 2 and the brand new Gallery 3, the granddaddy’s of photo galleries
• A nice file manager called eXtplorer
• A crafty terminal emulator called MindTerm
• Rnews, a nice RSS reader, for the power news users out there
• .. and a hometown favorite … OpenVPN ALS, a web-based VPN (for experts only!)

Cheers and enjoy!

The Amahi Team

We are also embarking in an adventure to make Amahi more successful and reach farther! We are going to offer 2 new premium accounts, with new services and support. We will make a few apps available in the Amahi App Store for a small convenience fee. About 2/3rds of the apps will remain as is, and the others would go for something like 99c to a few dollars, shared with the community and the app authors. Today we will start with our usual Free account, plus the new Pro and Ninja accounts

The first service we introduce is one that the community has been requesting for a while and we call Amahi Sync. Amahi Sync is an app that syncs files in designated shares on your HDA to a personal space online, one way from your HDA. It lets you easily backup, sync and share files in a network share, without installing any software in your client computers or other devices!

We are also introducing Server Alerts: a way to receive important notifications events related to your HDA. If you have logged in to your control panel recently, you may have seen the new alerts area! More on all this below. Back to Amahi 6!

Amahi 6.0: Reliability, Reliability, Reliability!

Amahi 6.0 brings a plethora of upgrades, reliability fixes and features, and better hardware support, courtesy of Fedora 14. Here are some of the highlights in this release (see the Amahi 6.0 release notes for all the details as well as the upgrade guide from Amahi 5/Fedora 12).

Application reliability. With HDAs distributed around the world, app installation could fail due to mirrors being down or unreachable (Sourceforge suffered a noticeable outage this past month). Amahi 6 uses a mirror system to minimize these errors down to zero. We are also in the process of building an even more robust mirror system (thanks to robbiet480 and smccloud for the efforts and server donations!).

Greyhole updates galore. The storage pooling technology in Amahi, Greyhole, is now at version 0.9. Greyhole has undergone tons of improvements and fixes, in part thanks to many in the community who really stressed it to the limits and exposed new issues. It also now uses a high-performance database as a back-end in Amahi 6, providing a 10X performance improvement in handling events!

Amahi 6.0 also introduces Anonymous/Guest share access, localize share names, and easy to manage webapp aliases (for the technical in you). It also supports (to a certain extent) upgrades from Amahi 5/Fedora 12! Check out the upgrade guide. Head on over to the Amahi 6.0 release notes for all the details!

So get your install on! Use the F14 DVD install for now, as the Express CD is being updated as we speak!

Online Synchronization, Server Alerts and Premium Plans!

The Amahi Sync and Server Alerts services (see screenshot of a server alert email to the right, below) join the very popular free VPN and dynamic DNS services, already providing reliable service for a long while.

Goal. These new plans and the recent Amahi Ready program for hardware vendors have the goal to take Amahi’s  success and extend it further and wider. In other words, we want to provide faster turn-around for features, perform rock-solid testing (we have built a small army of bots for app testing!), attract more apps (including non-open source apps), stimulate our contributors and testers (and manage the tester program properly) as well as provide professional support for these and newer services.

Many in the community have been very encouraging of this effort all along. We thank you for helping propel Amahi from a personal hobby, to the leading open source home server software used across 30+ countries and in 20+ languages.  And also having the coolest collection of media server apps and webapps!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on what services you would like to have the most. A small team of contributors have been testing Amahi Sync and we are implementing even more improvements immediately. We’re offering a 20% discount for those signing up in the next 4 weeks of this roll out!

Now what is this new Amahi Sync you ask? Amahi Sync monitors files in a share called Public (with further customizations coming soon) and it instantly synchronizes online under a subdomain of amahi.me. Amahi Sync is implemented via Amazon’s AWS services. Amahi Sync is meant for easy sharing by everyone in your network: anyone can put files in without needing to install software in client computers and devices as well as simple backup.

Quick FAQ for Amahi 6.0

• I installed the Amahi 6 beta. Do i need to reinstall? Good news! NO need to reinstall! The update is automatic a few hours after the repos are updated, your HDA will have the latest bits!
• Is the Express CD ready? Are all the apps ready? Nope, sorry. We are going to work on the apps and the express CD next!
• What architectures are supported? 32bit and 64bit x86 architectures (ARM is not yet supported in Amahi 6)
• Can I upgrade from Amahi 5: yes, with caution and patience. You don’t have to, however. Your Amahi 5 server will continue running for years if you let it run!
• I need help installing Fedora 14! Check the Full Fedora 14 install guide, which was designed for Linux novices and WHS converts into the Amahi way. Thanks slim!

Special Thanks!

Considering how Amahi 6 got over 230 installs in just the beta, it would be hard to credit everyone who participated in Amahi 6, from ideas, to documentation, to bugfixes, to testing. However, we’d like to give a collective THANK YOU to all those who have contributed in any way, since Amahi 6 looks like a very solid release!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

[Pics by steven depolo and Mykl Roventine]

This is the first partnership for an off-the-shelf system with Amahi pre-installed, something that has been in big demand among Amahi users.

So if you’ve wanted to buy Amahi pre-installed, Evo Technologies is shipping the first system worldwide today. Meet the ECOPC N.1!

Green. Silent. Small.
The N.1 uses 10~11W at idle, 16W at full CPU load with 2.5″ SSD (18W with 2.5″ HDD) and less than 1W at standby. It uses about 90% less power than standard PC. It saves on electric bills and reduces the environmental impact of CO2 emissions. The N.1 can be operated with a small fan, or totally fanless, therefore you don’t need to worry about a fan failing. No fan means no noise!

Facebook Likes, UPSs, FlexRAID and WOL, Wiki improvements

What an amazing few weeks we had. Amahi’s Facebook page has been abuzz with all sorts of suggestions and discussions. Everything from an energy saving feature, flexraid, UPS integration, and Wake-on-LAN (WOL) were discussed!

The Race to 1K and redesigned Facebook page!

The race to 1,000 Likes is on! Who do you know that could use Amahi? It’s our new goal here at Amahi, WE NEED 1,000 fans! So go out tell a friend or two, whether they have our platform installed or not, to jump on Facebook and Like us! So while you’re there check out the redesigned page! We like the increased fluidity of the page and how it feels more like a personal users page!

WOL, FlexRAID and UPS Integration

Amahi is all about variety and choice. Many people do not know much about using Wake-on-LAN (WOL). WOL is implemented for devices with DHCP leases and Static IPs, under Setup > Networking. This was introduced to Amahi last year, and you can “wake” devices remotely with it. Great for the highly resourceful user!

FlexRAID is a highly scalable and smart storage system currently in beta that turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into storage pools and storage pools into storage clouds.

Amahi Energy Saver is a project to make devices more energy-efficient. This project got an update and has a determined leader (hi jackrock!) and looks like it will be nicely integrated with Amahi! It’s in alpha, however, we hope to take it a step further to make energy savings part of the Amahi platform.

Recently we’ve also had an update on how to integrate a UPS with Amahi. Ghuiber’s efforts are documented in the Amahi Wiki under UPS setup.

Wiki Upgrades

If you followed those wiki links above you will have no doubt noticed the huge improvements in how the wiki looks and feels, with great looking templates for code, links, and easy to use notices. The speed at which the wiki changes is quite remarkable! And the amount of spam we get now in it has been curbed down big time. Take a moment to thank people improving the wiki and especially our wiki czars, smystaki and bigfoot65, for making all these great documentation improvements possible!

You told us what you think

Our goal with Amahi is to provide an easy, reliable, and expandable software platform for all of you.  We’ve asked the Facebook followers this: “What do you use Amahi for?”,  the answers probably seem familiar to most of you:

• Media Server
• VPN Server
• File Server
• App Server

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

The bug in question is that under certain conditions, users who should not have write permissions to a share could potentially write to it. It was fixed within minutes of being reported and the fix is available for the Amahi 6 beta. Fortunately there is an easy work-around for everyone else.

Who is Affected

If you set permissions to per-user access control to shares, you could be affected. If you did not turn off global writeability to the share before enabling per-user share control, you are affected.

Here is how it may happen: When a share has the “All users” and “Writeable” selected (which is the default) and the admin wants to manage per-users permissions and to give some users either read-only or no permissions, All users is unchecked. If Writeable is not unchecked first, users can still write to the share.

Typically one would click on All users to unclick it, to show all the users to control their permissions individually, without clicking on Writeable. Then manage the different users permissions. In this situation, the share would still be writeable to all users.

The Workaround

Fortunately, there is an easy work-around: unclick Writeable to before clicking on All users to manage their permissions individually. So, if you were affected and you had per-user permissions, you do this:

• check All users to enable all users access
• uncheck Writeable and then check All users again. All should be good then!

We have released and tested a fix for the Amahi 6 Beta release. You can see the details of the bug in our bug tracker.

Thanks go to Jimmy Hosio for hunting down this issue and to Bogdan (aka megabitdragon) for very quickly helping verify the fix!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Recently leaked reports reveal that Amahi 6 is in Beta, with an impending release!

Today we are happy to announce the newly-renamed Amahi 6 Beta for your testing pleasure. This is Platform and Base system only, VERY FEW APPS are available at this time.  We are shooting for a mid-February full release, after the beta testing. Early users report good things about the new pre-release bits and it should only be a little bit longer till release!

Grab a Fedora 14 DVD (not the live cd!), set this url http://f14.amahi.org as a repo and you are all set to kick the tires! Please report your findings and feedback in this forum thread.

We will have a bug week starting this Saturday February 5th. Reply in the forums, or come to the IRC channel with your  favorite fixes and bugs we just *must fix* in this release:) … A link to a bug in the bug tracker is required to participate   … We will report what’s new in Amahi 6 in the full release announcement but you can take a peek.

DLNA, FTP, Updates, Lots of New Apps

Amahi is becoming a media server powerhouse. Three weeks ago we released an update to the Amahi DLNA server app (now at v0.92.2), which brings stability fixes and enhanced compatibility with Samsung devices like TVs and settop boxes. Our community submitted these fixes upstream and were accepted right away!

Some other media oriented apps that are in beta still are getting some much-needed attention like MediaTomb (a transcoding DLNA server), PS3 Media Server (a PS3 centric DLNA server), CouchPotato, (an NZB downloader) and Sick Beard (a PVR for newsgroups).  We also have one cloud sharing app called Tonido. Media sharing is akey aspect of Amahi!

Did someone say FTP? We had avoided FTP (a legacy, but resilient, way to transfer files within your network) for the longest time, due to the fact that it’s not secure and that FTP over SSH is supported by many clients. However, you wanted FTP, so now we have two FTP servers apps available in beta thanks to the hard efforts of sabat and Solar_: vsftp and Proftp. Contact them in IRC or the forums to help test them.  Thanks to user ksjuggalo for help in packaging vsftpd!

More apps? Check out our pipeline of new apps …  how about Monitorix to monitor your network, and your HDA? Or how about Kmotion, a nifty home surveillance app. For the hardcore in you, if you do not want to miss a beat in IRC, how about having your own IRC bouncer with ZNC? Or a nifty app to check on the real-time health stats of your system, Linfo.

Kudos to the Community

Kudos to the community at this time where we had a large influx of new users from Windows Home Server. The team has trouble keeping up (and keeping you up-to-date!)  with everything going on in AmahiLand! We are recruiting to add to our awesome team a passionate community manager with great knack for communication to help us bring news in a concise and fun way to you faster. Interested? Get in touch with the team! (team at this domain …)

We recently have experienced more than triple the usual activity, related to Vail Fail. Lots of great feedback and some well deserved criticism on how to improve Amahi (we hear ya!). If you have spent any time in the Amahi IRC Channel, no doubt you’ve seen a lot of statements like “I’m new to Amahi and Linux, how do I…?” or, “I want to migrate my data from WHS Drive Extender to Amahi and Greyhole.”  These questions, as well as, features, apps, and support requests have generated a flurry of development and community activity. To support this we count with an outstanding community sharing their expertise in the IRC channel, in the wiki, and in the forums. Help is always readily available. So fear not, we few, we band of intrepid explorers in the wonders of the home server are here to aid the newly converted! Welcome fearless brethren, welcome! Special thanks to those new users who hang out in #amahi to help other new users with their expertise, this is very useful!

Amahi Edge!

We had bigger plans for what we used to call Amahi 6. Today we are renaming Amahi 6 to Amahi Edge. In addition of networking improvements and fixes that we have not merged in yet, Amahi Edge is the release with the elusive new dashboard, with more performance and efficiency, a new disk wizard, widgets, gadgets, and other whizzbang tech based on Ruby on Rails 3.0.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team.

First, check out the brand-spanking-new Amahi site: new logo, new overall look, better organization and navigation, and foremost, a much improved app store, one of our most frequent requests.

Many many thanks for the donations, for the reviews and the encouragement! We hope you like it!

New App Store

The biggest change is Amahi’s App Store, one of the largest of its kind!  We are adding more categories, a new slick page design for each of the apps, and on top of it all, it’s searchable.

The search box has already had over 1500 searches in just a few days! Welcome to the new Amahi App Store!  There are more features to come, … soon!

Greyhole Update

Today we have released Greyhole, 0.7.5. This new version, along with We would like to welcome a number of new users coming from the Windows Home Server world. We posted a migration guide by popular demand and it has revealed one weakness in the way we implemented Greyhole in Amahi by default.

Many WHS users with large existing data stores wanted to migrate their large collection of data, but the default Greyhole configuration in Amahi did not tolerate a massive migration well.  The load that the network copy created, especially on today’s fast networks, would often overrun the pace at which local data copying and replication takes place in Greyhole.  The cause of this bottleneck was a decision we made early on to use sqlite3, as a back-end for Greyhole out of a caution for reliability (something Amahi cares a lot).  The idea was to keep it as simple as possible, and not rely on another layer or dependency as a data management for Greyhole (MySQL).

As Greyhole was put to the test recently, it became clear that for performance purposes, MySQL was the much better choice.  Greyhole’s performance with MySQL is 330+ file transactions per second, an improvement over sqlite3′s 11 transactions per second.  Note that this is not data transfer rate but the rate at which file operations can be managed. Quite a staggering 30x improvement!

Today we’re releasing a new release of Greyhole (0.7.5) and a corresponding Amahi platform release (5.6.5) supporting Greyhole using MySQL as the back-end (though not by default yet). Also included are language translations for Russian and Swedish … thanks to our translations team!

Here is how to transition an existing system from sqlite to MySQL.

Two new Betas: Greyhole 0.8 and Mediatomb

Partly as a result of the performance analysis, we not have a new beta of Greyhole 0.8. In version 0.8, Greyhole now use spool files to log those operations. This is similar to how email servers work, and will makes Greyhole more efficient. If you crave the latest, the downloads are here: 32bit x86, 64bit x86-64, arm (for the plug computer).

For members of our beta program, check out Mediatomb, a UPnP/DLNA media server that works well with the Sony PS3. It can even transcode media on the fly, including many 1080p MKV streams! This is a very promising application, packaged by SolaR with great help from the community. Thanks!

For the latest from our community, we have ZNC (a personal IRC “bouncer” server), DaDaBIK, and for the true hacker in you Debian Lenny Network Installer. Lots of the community contributing apps!

Special Thanks

We would like to give special thanks to the team that helped us tune up the new site, provide feedback and polish things up!

Thanks to Guillaume and the small dedicated legion of recent Amahi converts for their enthusiasm and of course for a great effort in narrowing down this performance bottleneck and for providing a Greyhole migration script! Incidentally, Greyhole got a new web page too!

Happy Holidays to you if you are celebrating at this time of the year! Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Drive Extender migration guide

It’s a guide and a comparison of WHS’s Drive Extender vs Greyhole, the Storage Pooling technology built in with Amahi.

It’s things like this that highlight the importance of open source.

Microsoft has discontinued Drive Extender in the next version of Windows Home Server (WHS), nicknamed now #VailFail throughout the social networking sites. If this were open source software this simply could not have happened. Someone could simply fork the project and continue on – let the best code flourish!

This action riled testers, caused  thousands of angry and rude complaints, with many users now looking for a WHS alternative.

Amahi, with it’s implementation of Drive Pooling based on Greyhole, could be an ideal alternative for many.

We have not considered Amahi to be a competitor to Windows Home Server. For one, it’s not backed by a well-heeled corporation like Microsoft. However, many people have, and that’s OK. Just look at what some users have been saying about Amahi and Greyhole vs. WHS:

“[..] I am a freelance cameraman, video editor and photographer, I make high demands on reliability, usability and performance. WHS never cut it for me and the Drobo, which served me well for the past year, has a shockingly lacking performance [..]” — Axel Segebrecht, UK

“[..] So far I am extremely impressed. I have come from 4 reinstallations of WHS … From what I have seen Amahi is rock solid [..]“  –Ben Quittner, Victoria, Australia

“[..] I was an early adopter of Windows Home Server but wasn’t happy with it. It was “delicate”. Issues appeared on a daily basis and it didn’t “play well” with the non-Microsoft computers in my house. [..]” — Richard, Calgary, Canada

There are many more! See them at the Amahi testimonials page.

How You Can Help

At Amahi we care deeply about reliability. A home server has to be very reliable. Amahi is being used by thousands of users daily, most of them 24×7. Many tell us the reliability of Amahi is second to none, and much better than many routers or NAS devices. There was a lot of effort poured into the reliability aspect of Amahi from the very beginning.

Although many people in the community have worked hard to shake bugs out of Greyhole, one of the things that we know we have to do is knock out the more obscure bugs in it. While we have found and fixed a lot of the critical bugs, every software system has tougher bugs lurking. These are usually harder to expose and even harder to catch!

So, if you are interested in helping take Amahi and Greyhole to a whole new level, you can help with the Greyhole grinder initiative.

Reminder: Follow Amahi on Facebook and Twitter

Oh, and a reminder, Amahi recently got a fancy new “official” Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/amahi

So go ahead and “like” Amahi there to follow developments in Facebook. Your response has been great (about 400 fans in just a week or so!). You can also follow us on twitter.

Cheers!

Pic by: moparx

App releases have been a little sparse lately. The new Fedora 14 release is coming along very well and will co-exist nicely with Amahi. We are also working on a makeover of Amahi.org, which takes some time. Here is a teeny sneak peek to our new site

So we’ve picked a couple of nicely featured apps to release to the community. The testing team has been testing these apps for a bit now, so they should be in good shape. Amahi is becoming the largest App Store of its kind with the widest selection of one click webapps and media apps!

The first 3 Commandments of Data Storage and Integrity are Backup, Backup, Backup!  One of the highly sought after features  in a Home Server, is the ability to backup data from all of our network clients.  Now available as an Amahi One Click App is the versatile (and popular) CrashPlan backup solution.

Tin Can Jukebox is a very fast, full featured web jukebox that can securely stream large mp3 collections over the internet to multiple users.

CrashPlan

Tin Can Jukebox

Remember it’s your network and we’re fighting to keep it that way.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Fedora 14 was released a few hours ago and we got a small flood of requests asking if it’s working. It’s getting there!

We found an issue in Fedora 14 upstream that caused the Amahi installer to crash. We’re working around it and we’d like to release it for your testing.

Please see this thread on how to start testing Amahi on Fedora 14!

Many thanks go to bigfoot65 for the quick turn-around in isolating critical issues!

A few things will change, so we ask that you do not put this in a “production” system.

Cheers and happy hacking!

Carlos

It’s not Halloween without a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and while we are not literary poets, Amahi brings poetry-in-motion for the digital management of your media. We’re happy to announce our newest release, a new logo and and update on what’s next!

Amahi 5.6

Many enhancements and some fixes:

• New platform with a few simplifications in the user interface, major performance improvements for application installs, and some fixes: translations to Spanish/Polish/Japanese, DLNA improvements for .nfo support, enhanced support for elevated privileges in some apps, added functionality for wake-on-LAN (WOL) for dynamic leases, improvements to the Primary Domain Controller (PDC) and more …

• A new Greyhole release, v0.6.28, the very popular Storage Pooling technology built in with Amahi, with some stability updates and a new feature: browsing the recycle bin with a share
• A new release of Amahi Plug Edition, version 1.0, for the popular Plug Computer! This update includes over 10 performance updates and tweaks, so that Amahi can run in even the most resource constrained Plug devices with as low as 128MB of memory, like the Seagate Dockstar or a PogoPlug.

New Logo!

We’ve got a new logo! This is the “dice” logo and we’re very happy to announce this! It turns out that choosing a new logo was a pretty intense experience (with 400+ entries received and so many good designs, mixed with opinions of every kind).

We got a lot of great feedback and we will be deploying the new logo along with a makeover of Amahi’s website soon!

Skipping Fedora 13 for F14

You’ve all been asking and we’ve decided to skip Fedora 13 and head straight to Fedora 14, due in 3 days! This provides numerous advantages to Amahi, including kernel updates without reboots!

We see a pattern of supporting even releases! (We also skipped F11).

Many thanks to obinou and ppmt for testing the new release of the Amahi Plug Edition, to Mouton for the great progress on Greyhole, to all of you in the community who gave feedback for the logo and for helping test the new release! Amahi could not do all this without you!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Photo by euart

Videos5 lets you stream your media to devices that can support HTML5, like the iPhone, iPad and iPod, Android devices and many others. It even lets you easily queue your media for transcoding to the format appropriate for streaming*.

Videos5 is expected to play well with the much buzzed about Google TV devices (Logitech revue, Sony TV). While everyone is steering people to watch things from the internet … how about watching your media in your screen(s)?!

Here is a quick video tour of the Videos5 app being used from an iPad:

Gallery 3

Gallery 3 is the latest from The Gallery Project.  Gallery 2 has been one of the most popular one-click apps in Amahi. So its successor is highly anticipated!

Gallery is the premier open source web based photo album organizer. It gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you’re running a small personal site, large community site, or you’re just running it off of your HDA internally within your own network!

Back to Videos5

Have you ever had that one movie, the one you love, but is just too big for your phone or iPad? Now you can stream your videos to your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad or browser (and easily transcode it, if necessary)!

Videos5 allows you to stream your MPEG-4 (H.264) videos using any HTML5-compliant browser: Safari, Chrome & Android as well as the new versions of Firefox and Opera.

For each file that isn’t ready to stream, Videos5 will allow you to queue it for background transcoding. It even supports thumbnails. If your Movies share contains folder.jpg and filename.tbn files (also used by XBMC), those will be used in Videos5. Check the Videos5 wiki page for the juicy details.

We anticipate that you are now itching to go try out this new app for yourselves! Videos5 is now live!

As a pioneering leader in digital home management we are proud to bring you these two new apps. So get out there try it and rejoice in the wonders in which Amahi strives to bring you! Both of these apps deserve a Hollywood style Red Carpet Premier!  Flash! Glamour & Glitz!

Amahi is about making networking simple! Because it’s your network!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team
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* Transcoding not available yet in the Amahi Plug Edition

We have been planning an entire site makeover for a little while now. How do we best represent an award winning Home Server with the largest App Store of its kind, with a burgeoning community and user base?

To get this party started we dove in head first with the help of a popular site for logo competitions and … fast forward a few days … “Let the good times roll ” … and we got a LOT of submissions! 200+ of them! Some were provocative, some were sexy, and all were well done. See a small collage of them below.

We have selected 8 out of the many fine entries, and we would like you to participate. Help us choose one by voting for the ones you like the most. So take a look drop your vote to let us know what you think!

Drive to Chip In

Would you like to chip in towards the logo and site makeover? We already have one donation from gjc1000 … thanks Chris! We have taken a more economical and competitive approach to getting a design for our logo and website, but even so, it is not an inexpensive task for a fledgling Open Source Project to undertake. We are holding a drive to help with the the logo and site design. Would you like to contribute in your own way? Here is a good chance!

We know that you work hard for your money, and hope that you can see the value in supporting Amahi in a small (or large) way. We have a great community, who has contributed not only with code, themes and apps but also on mirrors and hosting! We work hard to bring the absolute best home server technology to you!

Now go vote (and chip in)! Tweet and post your favorites in Facebook!

Want to see all 200+ entries in the Amahi logo contest. Go check them out and let us know if you feel strongly for some of these beyond the 8 that are limited in the poll!

Wow! We are blown away with the innovative ways in which the community responded to the theme and app contest!

We got 9 new themes, which we are releasing live today (screenshots below) and we even have a top notch VoIP/PBX app, FusionPBX and a hot full-disk backup solution, Redo Backup, in progress!

Today we bring you this: The winners, the features, and … a new Amahi release!

Amahi 5.5!

Amahi 5.5 brings a guest dashboard for non-logged in users, a few fixes and some better networking and app support, along with Wake-on-LAN/WOL. Also included is an update in Greyhole with some bug fixes. Thank you for reporting and testing them!

And the Winners are …

Without further ado, look at the new features the new themes brought on: vertical tabs, mobile support, highlights in rows, nicely shaped tabs, … even an Easter egg in the theme! These innovations result in a smoother looking, cleaner dashboard, just another step forward in the evolution of Amahi.  Kudos to the individuals who contributed, you are another reason why the Amahi community is a great place!

The entries for the theme and app contest came from Florida, Indiana, Germany, Georgia, the Netherlands, Canada and Texas!

One of the biggest new features in a theme is Ben Wyatt’s Touch Theme that integrates mobile functionality, allowing for better control and improved rendering in iPhone/iPod/Android/WebOS devices. Check out our wiki for how to mod your Android based phone or iPhone to add VPN capabilities. What’s better than controlling your server from your phone?

Coming up!

What’s coming up? Amahi 6, with a whole slew of new features! Amahi 6 will leverage new features and advancements of Ruby on Rails 3.0 (released yesterday BTW). Amahi 6 will incorporate performance improvements, javascript helpers, cross site scripting protection, and very cool Amahi Gadgets and Widgets. More on this soon!

Enjoy the screenshots below, and congratulations to the winners and runner-ups! Can’t wait to see what you guys do with your new Plug Computer!

Touch Theme submitted by Ben Wyatt

Ocean Theme submitted by MartinF

On the Horizon submitted by slm4996

Celestial Theme submitted by SolaR

Zombie Parade submitted by llamallama

Carbon Theme submitted by MartinF

Shades of Grey submitted by slm4996

Chupacabra Theme submitted by the one and only Chupacabra

Colorus Theme submitted by Guillaume Boudreau

Sheeva theme launched to kick off the Theme Contest