Amahi Blog

The Amahi App team has been at it again!  No, not another marathon (yet!), just a few updates.  Updated to the latest version is Monitorix, the system monitoring tool, which is available live in the Store that houses Amahi Apps.     Also updated are two Beta apps: Feng Office, the web based collaboration suite and phpList, the email campaign manager. We love app updates!

Cheers!

Monitorix
Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor as many services as possible. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices’ interrupt activity are also monitored, and more. The current status of any corporate server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

BETA APP UPDATES: Feng Office and phpList have been updated to the latest version. Enjoy Amahi Pro subscribers!

Feng Office
Feng Office (formerly OpenGoo) allows businesses to manage project tasks, billing, documents, communication with co-workers, customers and vendors, schedule meetings and events, and share every kind of electronic information.

phplist
phplist is the world’s most popular open source email campaign manager. phplist is easy to integrate with any website.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

The Bug Genie
An open source, web-based issue tracking system – built on free and open source technology. Enhancing your development process by offering an advanced tool to manage bug reports, feature requests and user feedback for your products.

Meet the Express CD v1.0 for Amahi 6.1

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

Today we present you a few fantastic announcements: Amahi 6.1 release, a new Amahi Ready™ hardware partner, new app updates … and … the first, Alpha Zero, release of Amahi Ubuntu Edition! We’re excited about this!

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

The Amahi team is thrilled to announce Amahi 6 today!

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]