Amahi Blog

Amahi 6 Beta

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.

It was one of those brilliant things in life…

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

Are you new to Amahi, or a crafty veteran?  Whatever your skill level may be, there are several outlets where you can get support.   One of Amahi’s greatest strengths is its dedicated community of core developers, contributing programmers, application testers, and passionate users from around the globe.

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