Amahi Blog

I couldn’t resist – I signed up for the Windows 7 beta, installed it on an old workhorse desktop (2GHz, 1.5G RAM, 120G HD – Asus P4P800 motherboard).

The installation went extremely smoothly – including the drivers for my old Nvidia graphics card and my HP4600 scanner. After starting the browser (setting my search providers, turning off a whole lot of IE8 add-ins, etc) I tried accessing my Amahi home server. There wasn’t a hitch.

Accessing the Amahi shares is way faster than on XP, let alone Vista. The summary: Amahi works well with Windows 7 (though I still have to test the Amahi VPN from a Windows 7 client).

The Amahi home server Forums are here!

The IRC channel has been busy (too busy at some times). The Amahi users mailing list is getting used to answer similar questions repeatedly. In both these areas we have also found many discussions are recurring – the sort of issues that are well suited to be answered/supported in a forum.

After this “indirect demand” and requests from community members, we have finally established some forums for the Amahi home server. It may take a little time for the community to populate the forums – but we’re off to a good start!

The forums are located at

http://forums.amahi.org

The forums are single sign-on with the mains Amahi home server site.

In this newsletter

• New Amahi Web Site
• Platform Improvemens
• News on Applications

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New Amahi Web Site

In this newsletter, we’re happy to announce the launch of our fresh new web site!

http://www.amahi.org

As our user base expands rapidly to several hundred existing users and into the thousands, the web site has been enhanced for a better user experience and to help existing as well as prospective users quickly answer questions about Amahi. Here are some of the new features:

• Very handy custom search engine at the top to search for Amahi-only topics in the wiki, FAQ, blog and more, powered by Google
• New, two-level, menu structure, with easier navigation across the entire site
• Revamped features page, with a new features gallery, new technology overview and community sections
• New wizard to configure your own HDA(s) within seconds, and most importantly, without sending emails. How’s that for instant gratification!
• An area for latest news in the front page

We’re very excited about this new web site, as it provides us a way to start adding cool new features that our users want and we hope all users will find useful!

A number of people provided great help and feedback to get this new web site up and running, including Gerald, who did most of the work to get it going, Ash, Greg, Guy, Luke, Mayte, and a few others!

Many thanks to everyone!!

We continue to improve in the rankings for our area and keep on increasing our daily visitor traffic, which keeps driving new user adoption every day. We have great feedback all the time!

Platform Improvements

Amahi is based on Linux, and it provides a platform on which rich web applications can be deployed.

This platform has been improved tremendously in terms of performance, stability and features in recent times.

We are actively working on the API and recruiting developers to develop more applications. We have a theme engine, and we now have one theme deployed and two others in the making that fully utilize it!

The new theme, conceived by a designer, Alvin Lai, and implemented by cooperation of several Amahi enthusiasts can be seen in this link.

News on Applications

As most of you know, we believe applications are the cornerstone of the Amahi Linux Home Serever.

There are a few applications available, some of them demo apps designed to showcase what the platform can do and some of them already very useful.

The one application that has improved a lot is “slideshow”. This application now advertises Media RSS feeds along with the picture pages. Thanks to that, one can use the amazing browser plug-in called PicLens to see all your pictures in a truly amazing way.

PicLens is a browser plugin that lets you see your pictures in a 3-dimensional immersive “wall” that you can navigate with amazing ease. In fact it’s so immersive, some people get dizzy while browsing their picture collection!

In our family we found we have (somehow) accumulated over 10 _thousand_ pictures over the years. We had no idea we had so many. With PicLens, we were able to fly through all the pictures and enjoy them in a way we had not experienced before, not even with desktop apps!

PicLens can be used to see Flickr albums, Google images, YouTube videos and a host of other sites with the same experience!

More to Come

We have several other apps that have improved over time and have new features coming, one new theme coming this week (maybe more), and many other news in the pipeline …

We’d like to give thanks to our enthusiast users, who keep us going, with ideas, patches, themes, and some bits of patience as the platform comes together!

Lots of new things in the horizon for Amahi! You can see all that we have been up to in our blog. We’ll keep you posted of future news there also!

We’re happy to announce the launch of our new and improved web site!

This new web site (small screenshot below) features the following juicy new enhancements:

• Very handy custom search engine at the top to search for Amahi-only topics in the wiki, FAQ, blog and more, powered by Google
• New, two-level, menu structure, with easier navigation across the entire site
• Revamped features page, with a new features gallery
• New technology overview section with a brief overview of the technology in this Linux-based home server, how to get the code, etc.
• New wizard to configure your own HDA(s) within seconds, and most importantly, without sending emails. How’s that for instant gratification! This will cut installation time by at least a few minutes
• New budding section on community, how to get involved, credits, and a bit about us.
• An area for news in the front page, and a whole easy to search news area
• … and and nice little footer with some handy links to this blog, the wiki, the FAQ and the rest of the standard stuff you see on most web sites

We’re very excited about this new web site, as it provides us a way to start adding new features that we hope you find useful!

A number of people provided great help and feedback to get this new web site up and running, including Gerald, who did most of the work to get it going!, Ash, Guy, Luke, Mayte, Greg, and a few others!

Many Thanks!!

Click on this mini screenshot and it will take you there!

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