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

We had fantastic tweets and superb followers retweet for the chance to win their own Amahi Plug Computer! The retweeting got interesting near the end with 200 tweets in the last six hours and a great response for the entire contest!

But have no fear if you didn’t win the retweet contest! The Amahi theme and app contest is going strong and gaining speed with 6 chances to win a Plug Computer! Just remember that it ends on Sunday August 22 at the stroke of midnight (Pacific Time, if you are wondering ).

Check out how the contest is going so far. See the the two entries by @slm4996 including Shades of Gray and On the Horizon, the bright Chupacabra theme by (ironically) Chupacabra, the popular Colorus theme by Mouton. For those of you who still want to get into the action we’ve got some cool resources in our wiki, like a detailed guide , including the new ability to have custom Javascript on a theme. Don’t forget to check the rules.

It does look like we may even get a mobile theme!

So get out there do your thang and get your Theme on!

Intrepid observers noticed that you can get a PogoPlug in the US with a nice rebate from Fry’s until the end of the day TODAY (note that the PogoPlug is not too friendly when it comes to rooting it, so you are better off doing a nice theme ).

We did not forget about the apps – bring on a new and exciting app and enter the contest! We will value apps with more weight than themes, so your extra effort will be compensated!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

The Amahi team is all jumpy in excitement with this new “Plug Edition” release to the  ARM ecosystem and the Plug Computing platform, in partnership with Marvell. In these days when eco-friendly technologies are a must, the Plug Computer brings a number of advantages to running a home/media server at very low power. Now you’re probably thinking …

COOL, I want one! How do I get in on the action?

If you have one already and are ready to take the plunge, head on to the release page to see how to install Amahi on it! Or buy one if you need the hardware … OR … wait … get one FREE …!?

Today we’re also launching a theme and app contest, where 6 winners get a FREE 1.2GHz Ionics Stratus Plug Computer (pictured above), with WiFi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave (for wireless home control) and Gigabit Ethernet, sponsored by Marvell!

You don’t have the artistic or coding skills? Follow @amahi and retweet this tweet and you could win one FREE Ionics Stratus plug too! Follow the rules in the contest page.

To kick things off, we are releasing the brand new Sheeva theme (high res) inspired by Marvell’s PlugComputer.org site.

Even better, if you are a developer and are interested in learning more about developing for this platform check out Marvell’s developer day, PlugIN 2010 (August 18th). Attendees will get a full day of developer sessions and receive a Plug Computer development kit.

Amahi + Marvell = Smart

The synthesis of the Plug Computer’s compact design, low power, and headless operation with Amahi’s powerful, easy to use features, efficient network management combined with one of the largest app stores of its kind, is a very smart choice for a home server:

• The Plug Computer offers remarkably low power consumption: 3 ~ 8 Watts. Nice!
• It’s fanless and virtually noiseless. If you run yours with a flash drive, it has zero noise
• Small footprint. You can put your server wherever it’s convenient. If you are in tight quarters, this is the perfect solution!
• It’s inexpensive. Typically Plug Computers run $99 for a base system

Low Power, Heavy Lifting

Amahi Plug Edition is a powerful home server, capable of running lots of apps, from the simplest file sharing to iTunes streaming, to wikis, backups, and soon, DLNA media streaming to Sony or Samsung TVs as well as popular set top boxes with DLNA clients built-in.

Amahi Plug Edition running on a typical Plug Computer draws about 3 Watts idle, 7 to 8 Watts while booting and about 4 Watts with bursts of 6 Watts while streaming a full movie to an iPad with our very popular Videos5 app or a full 1080p stream to an HDTV. Not bad!!

All this goodness does not come without effort. While everyone was fussing about net neutrality, the iPad and antennagate, the team toiled, getting this release ready for your maximum enjoyment. Kudos to Scott, Guillaume, Rod, OB, Ofer, Pat, Peter & the crew. In addition, none of this would be possible without the Fedora ARM team for a great job!!

Cheers!

If you’ve visited the Forums or Community Channel, you have no doubt seen the question, “How do I access my Apps when I’m away from home?”.  It is one of the most requested features for Amahi.  Contributor Guillaume Boudreau took on the challenge and created Amahi Web Apps Proxy.  This App makes it simple to access your Amahi Apps over the Internet, if  VPN is not an option for you.   Please educate yourself on the security implications of Hosting a website.

If you do host a website, commercial or personal, Piwik can provide you with a plethora of information about the traffic and visitors on your site (known as analytics).  Piwik is hosted on your server, so the visitor data stays private. It also has a plug-in feature for easy customization.

We hope you have fun with these new Apps and find them useful. Read on for more!

ArcademSX

Also check out the two game packs that we are releasing ArcademSX Game Pack 1 and ArcademSX Game Pack 2

Amahi Web-Apps Proxy

Amahi Web-Apps Proxy allows the use of multiple Amahi applications using a single host name (URL).

This could allow you to access all your Amahi applications by using your http://username.yourhda.com URL, from outside your local network. Make sure you enter a username and password to limit access to only authorized users, the first time you access the application.

Piwik

All the program’s features are built as plugins, which means you can easily add new plugins built by the community to customize your own Piwik installation. If you have specific needs then you can build a plugin that processes data in a different way.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team.

Funny things happen in FOSS communities, and Amahi is no exception!

It was a normal to quiet day on the Amahi Community Channel, when an un-named regular said:

“You know what would be cool? a “Wake” button, next to each entry in the Static IPs page.”

Wake-on-LAN (or WOL), standard that allows a computer to be magically turned on or woken up by a network message.

The community wheels really kicked into motion when other team members started searching for icons to use in the dashboard while many others tested some code. Then, before long, the team had a working platform with the new WOL feature to be released in the next update!

Amahi is taking long strides to bring your network back to the land of the free! This is but another step on our path to bring you the best that Amahi can offer!

The World cup championship is this weekend. We hate to pick sides! Really we do! But if we had to well … Our Spain supporters argued that our long term logo had been supporting the Netherlands all along with all that orange, so we decided to give a nudge to Spain for a few days

OK, we’re a bit biased, as the core team is partly formed by one spaniard

So sit back, relax, and enjoy friendly competition while two great teams battle each other for the coveted World Cup Trophy!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

MediaWiki is the industry pioneer for the Wiki platform. Originally developed for Wikipedia, it is now used on tens of thousands of Wiki sites across the web, including our own Amahi Wiki.

Can’t remember when little Johnny’s soccer game is or that LUG meeting? Set yourself an email reminder in this essential app for home and office, WebCalendar. Single or multiuser support, check it out in your HDA just one click!

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many many other wikis.
MediaWiki is free server-based software, designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its database This version comes customized for Amahi using a SQLite database.

Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily.

When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the file system. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

WebCalendar

WebCalendar is a calendar application that can be configured as a single-user calendar, a multi-user calendar for groups of users, or as an event calendar viewable by visitors.

Overview of Features:

• XHTML/CSS compliance
• Multi-user support
• Auto-detect user’s language preference from browser settings
• View calendars by day, week, month or year
• and so much more…..

Enjoy!

Along with it, we also are happy to announce the Amahi Express CD!

Faster than Superman can rescue Lois Lane, the Express CD downloads and installs in minutes and gets you the most stable Amahi HDA ever.

Too bad you can’t install one AT THE OFFICE

Amahi 5.4 brings top notch stability improvements as well as UI improvements in looks and speed:

• The installed applications show first on the apps tab so that it loads much faster
• The servers tab is no longer an advance setting. It’s directly under Settings now, easy to reach
• The default workgroup is now set to WORKGROUP, for easier interaction with Windows clients
• … and more! See the 5.4 release notes for the details.

Amahi 5.4 should be now on your HDA, automatically updated!

Without further ado (drumroll) we bring you the …

Amahi Express CD

The Express CD is an all-in-one, up-to-date, Amahi CD, for headless install, derived from Fedora 12. It’s the fastest and simplest way to install Amahi by far to date!

• Express: it will automatically WIPE OUT your entire first drive for you (unless you chose the expert option).
• Headless: there is NO desktop after install. This means faster and meaner, no wasted resources on graphics.
• All-in-one: all the packages are included, much less downloading needed.
• Up-to-date: the latest upstream updates from Fedora and from Amahi at the time the CD was pressed are included right in!

The development team got this down to about 400 MB, or about 10 times smaller than the regular install! Download, burn and share with some friends!

Still need a desktop after all of this? We’ve got you covered with the desktop packages after you install.

When you stop by the community channel or the forums please take a minute to thank Solomon (slm4966) and the testers team for the hard work in putting this Express CD together and testing it!

This is expected to be our last release on Fedora 12 and the last in the 5.x series. Can’t wait to see the new goodies in 6.0!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Credit iwalk.jp and tharrin @ flickr

“I wish there was another way to do this.”

Well hell’s bell’s folks… here’s a couple! You’re thoughts on the alternatives didn’t work out the way you’ve planned so we’ve gone ahead and packaged a few for you to use (yeah we wish there were leprechauns in our machine too).

Read on for more!

PHP Navigator

Features:

• User friendly Explorer style navigation and view. Fully customizable.
• Multi user support (need MySQL).
• Advanced AJAX and DOM to avoid reloading of the full page.
• gzip deflate encoding gives you rocket speed data transfer!
• It inherits the colour scheme of your window system. See the magic of css2!
• Thumbnail view for wbmp,jpg,png,gif.
• Right click context menu.
• Built in HTML editor, Code editor.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Download folder as zip.
• Extract zip archive to current folder.
• And the BEST OF ALL, it’s FREE!!

eXtplorer

The Main Features of eXtplorer are:

• Copy/Move Files and Directories by Drag/Drop
• Dynamic Directory Tree with on-demand loading of subdirectories
• Edit Files (with Syntax-Highlighting thanks to EditArea)
• Rename, Delete or Create new Files and Directories
• Access Files through FTP or directly (using PHP) to totally overcome permission and file ownership issues
• Upload or Download files just as you like
• Create and Extract Archives (ZIP, Tar, Tar/GZ, Tar/BZ)
• User Management with different permission levels like “View only” or “Edit” and “Admin”
• Available as a component for Joomla! and Mambo.
• And much much more….

All these features are packed into an intuitive Layout which makes working with files very easy. Thanks to the great ExtJS Javascript Library you can drag/drop folders and files, filter directories and sort the file list using various criteria.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

What would YOU say about Amahi? Be sure to post your thoughts. Best one wins the Most Interesting Comment in the World

If you are not familiar with The Most Interesting Man in the World, from the beer commercials, see a selection of his ads.

We also made a “crash demo” of Amahi under 60 seconds, for new users

Let us know what we can improve in the video.

The Amahi Community is an ever changing and growing alliance, where our common goal is to create and support an easy to use home server.  There are several ways to get help when you run into a problem or just have a simple question.  Currently in place are the Wiki, Forums, Chat, and Email to support at amahi dot org.

The search box at the top of the Amahi site is a consolidated user search of all the Amahi sites! That probably should be your first destination!

Community resources at your fingertips

The Amahi Wiki is a community driven site built on the popular MediaWiki.  It contains a vast array of topics ranging from Installation, Applications, Troubleshooting, Roadmap, and many others.  It also includes a robust search feature, so this is a good starting point when looking for troubleshooting info.  This is also an area where you can contribute: register in the wiki with a (wik-specific) username and password to edit or add information.

The Amahi Forums is another place to get support if you cannot find the answers on the Wiki. The forum is broken down into a few specific topics, an area for the forum itself, and an area for developer topics.  Your amahi.org username and password will allow you to log in and post.    After you have searched the forum and not found an answer for your specific question, post your question in the area that best fits your issue.  When posting your question, it is best to give as much detail as possible, including error messages, log files, or anything else that may aid the reader to help solve your problem. Also, if in your travels through the forums you see a question that you know the answer to, jump in there and answer it. You can also find some fun user stories and even pictures of their HDA’s on the forum!

And yet another spot to get help, or just come to hang out, is the #amahi channel on IRC Chat .  If you are not familiar with IRC, you can get up to speed quickly with a brief review of this tutorial.  If you’re a veteran, just point you client to #amahi on irc.freenode.net . The best approach when coming to IRC for help is to join the channel, check the Topic at the top of the page for useful links, say hello, and ask your question.  The key is to be patient!  Most of the people on the channel are doing other things too, or could be helping other users, so it may be a a few minutes before your query is answered. Amahi has a paste bin, for your long error messages or log files. Use it, then paste the url in the channel, so you don’t clog it up with code, etc.

Take the IRC Bot for a spin. With the commands listed you can do look up bugs, wiki pages, store and retrieve factoids, recall the last Amahi twitter post, see when a user was last seen on the channel, and even do Google searches of the web, wiki, and forums.

The New … Satisfaction!

Yet another way to discuss and get help is the new Amahi GetSatisfaction area! There are forums for asking questions, sharing ideas, reporting problems or even giving praise! This is our newest venue, and we would like to promote it. In particular, it has a great system to lend support for new ideas. This makes it easy to see what ideas are the most popular or most in demand! Please start using it often!

These are just a few of the ways you can get and share support in the Amahi Community.  You can also visit the FAQ, the Support page and if you are interested, contribute!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

The team has had a busy last few weeks with a small surge in growth from the FLOSS weekly interview and our award from Linux Format magazine, along with new features. We are proud to bring you Amahi 5.3! There are so many new features to this release that this announce should be for a 6.0!

First up, we have a wide beta release of a new disk pooling and replication technology brought by Greyhole! Amahi is the very first to integrate and release Greyhole widely and we’re proud of that. See the first of the two videos embedded below (less than 3 minutes)!

Then we have a new one-click automatic VPN tester in the Amahi control panel, a new VPN configurator for Mac OS X, deb packages for Ubuntu, plus dozens of new apps in our app store!

… and we have a little teaser video for you at the end of this post, for a new HOT app called Videos5 (also from the very prolific Guillaume, the author of Greyhole!), to encode and stream videos to your iPad, iPhone, Android devices and other HTML5-enabled browsers.  

Disk Pooling and File Replication using Greyhole

Disk pooling is the hottest new function to Amahi. Disk Pooling uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives. It also allows you to create redundant copies (from 2 to whatever the max-number of disks you have in the pool) of the files you store. This can help prevent data loss if part of your hardware fails. Configure as many hard drives as you’d like to be included in your pool. You’re storage pool size will be the sum of the free space in all the hard drives you include. Your hard drives can be internal, external (USB, e-Sata, Firewire…), or even mounts of remote file systems, and you can include hard drives of any size in your pool. This is very exciting technology in Beta, so please use only with non-critical data. Hit the first video below for a short overview!

We’re Making Things Easier

• Localization/translation improvements to 10 languages and new in this release we have the first bits of Japanese (Thanks Shingo!). This makes Amahi available in 20 languages!
• New, much easier to install, Mac OS X VPN configuration package
• Multiple UI improvements across the setup pages, for usability and consistency. See some eye candy
• Installer improvements for stability and reliablity as well as usability (it suppresses some of the loud warnings)
• App dependencies! One click installs all apps needed for one app to work!
• A lot of updates related to building .deb packages for Ubuntu support (Thanks anzenketh!)
• Improved calendaring, create an empty calendar on the HDA for an easy link to publishing or subscribing to calendars.
• Get the details in the Amahi 5.3 release notes!

As usual, if you are on Amahi 5.x, you should have received Amahi 5.3 already via automatic update (unless you turned them off).

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Video: Storage Pooling and Replication with Greyhole

Teaser for the Videos5 app in beta

Encode and stream videos to your iPad, iPhone, Android devices and other HTML5-enabled browsers.

So, to continue our pace, we are taking 3 very exciting Apps from beta to live, to make Amahi even more useful!

First is a very useful app from our prolific contributor Mouton: the Amahi Bookmarks App. Based on Mozilla’s Weave Sync API for the Firefox browser. Now you can sync your bookmarks, history, and passwords across all of your machines (and across all the users the your network!) with the Firefox Weave plug-in. A number of us on the team are using it already!

The often asked question “How can I access my data from outside my network?”, now has a straight forward solution.  Although OpenVPN is available by default with Amahi,  with ALS you don’t need a machine with a client installed.  OpenVPN ALS allows you to securely access your network through any browser that supports HTTPS.

And for the analyst in you, we offer in our Application Gallery, the web based phpLogCon.  Now it’s quick and easy to find that log entry by opening a simple browser window.

Read on!

Bookmarks

Weave Sync currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs; you can preserve your settings on your own Amahi HDA.

OpenVPN ALS

phpLogCon

The Amahi Team!

As always the Amahi Team is hard at work to bring you more Apps.  Is there is an App you would like to see on Amahi?  Just click on Suggest under Applications at Amahi.org

sabnzbd

NOTE: Amahi Application RPM Fusion (Non-Free) MUST be installed first.
It simplifies the process of downloading from Usenet dramatically, thanks to its friendly web-based user interface and advanced built-in post-processing options that automatically verify, repair, extract and clean up posts downloaded from Usenet. SABnzbd also has a fully customizable user interface, and offers a complete API for third-party applications to hook into.

osTicket

• Web and Email SuppportTickets can be created via email, online forms or phone (created by staff). Flexible configuration and mapping.
• Auto ResponseAutomatic reply that is sent out when a new ticket is opened or a message is received. Customizable mail templates.
• And much much more

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Web KeePass
KeePass is a free open source password manager to help you securely manage your passwords. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file.

Features and Key Benefits:

• Very strong compound data encryption
• Completely web based over totally secure HTTPS connection
• And much much more

Cheers!

The Amahi Team.

Pack up your bags we’re going to the show! FLOSS Weekly that is!

One of the core members (and founder) of Amahi, Carlos Puchol (aka cpg), is the guest of the 112th show, taping tomorrow March 10th, at 1:30 PM Pacific Standard Time (live brocast link). Post your question here in this post or ask in the forums!

FLOSS Weekly is a show on the TWiT network that premiered on April 7th, 2006.  The show contains interviews with prominent evangelists and developers in the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software movement and is hosted by radio personality Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz.

Check out the distinguished group of interviewees that we join! Kent Beck (extreme programming),  Ward Cunningham (inventor of wikis), Miguel de Icaza (GNOME, Ximian, Mono), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP), Tim O’Reilly (OSS visionary), Guido van Rossum (Python), Linus Torvalds (Linux), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia). Makes one kinda humble

Most episodes feature the primary developer or developers of a particular project. This episode is about Amahi!

The format of the show is an open discussion with a live irc in parallel, with the hosts asking about the guest and the project. Typically, the host will ask about the history of the project, how the concept was envisioned, its development model and so forth.

So come on out, pull up a chair, log-on and get your listening on!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

We’re happy to share that Amahi just got chosen the Hottest Pick award by Linux Format magazine!

… there aren’t many easier ways of getting [a server] set up than installing [Amahi]

That’s what they had to say! Linux Format is UK’s largest  Linux magazine and one of the largest circulation Linux mags in the world, including bookstores and electronics stores. The March issue (LXF129) will be in the shelves in the next 2 or 3 weeks, so look for it!

In addition to this, next Wednesday March 10, at 1.30pm PST (10:30pm EST), there is a live interview about Amahi with founder Carlos Puchol on TWIT.TV’s FLOSS Weekly, one of the most popular free/open source video casts. We’re happy to be featured in this program which often brings illustrious guests. Video to be available a few hours after the live program ends. Suggest your questions to discuss!

Release time! Drum roll please …

Today we announce Amahi 5.2. The bits should be already installed in most Amahi systems by now. This is mostly a bugfix release, with a few major features taking shape, many of them contributed by a strong new team member Guillaume Boudreau (aka Mouton):

• Notably, we have started working on integrating a very exciting Drive Pooling technology called Greyhole: redundancy across drives, expandable storage on a JBOD-like architecture!
• Added an “extras” options in the shares to do a lot of advanced things, like adding quotas, running antivirus, add recycle bins to shares, add guest access, or auditing capabilities, in addition to supporting the development of Greyhole.
• Automatic support for automatic time zone setup of  PHP applications
• Automatically back up app databases when updating and of course other improvements for supporting apps
• TONS of application updates: eyeOS, FengOffice, Ampache, Gallery, etc. etc.
• The DLNA server has been updated to support M3U/PLS playlists
• AmahiTunes has been released as a new app with streaming built in right on the app
• Improvements to Dutch, Spanish, with new alpha support for Japanese
• … and many more fixes and improvements!

Simplicity is what we aim for! It’s your network and Amahi  makes it easy to keep it that way. No complex setup, no graduate degree, and no other software installation is needed. We’re thrilled that Amahi has been recognized in this way by a well known magazine!

Now, one of the things that we don’t do enough is to thank you, the community. You have been with us through thick and thin, always diligently reporting what works and what doesn’t, made contributions, improved documentation, and most of all you have continued to share and evangelize the amazing features of Amahi. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!