Amahi Blog

We’re very happy to announce the first release of Amahi Plug Edition for the Plug Computer platform based on the Marvell ® ARMADA processor! And you can snag one FREE in our new contest!

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!

Hey Home Servers can be for gaming too!  With this latest app release, Amahi brings Arcade gaming to your Amahi Server! ArcademSX and Game Packs 1 & 2 bring classic arcade games to your network.  Many other game packs are also available.

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!

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ArcademSX
ArcademSX is here, the most advanced free arcade script ever released. With ArcademSX, you can install game packs from AVArcade, GameSiteScript, phpArcadeScript, and even use highscore compatible IBProArcade games to allow your users to compete for the top spot in your arcade.
No other arcade script is as easy or feature packed,  as Arcadem Pro. There are many more great features, check them out here or at the parent site here.

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

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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.

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Piwik
Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software package. It provides detailed reports on your website and its visitors, including the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, which pages they like, the files they download and so much more. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

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.

We’re happy to announce Amahi 5.4 today!

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

It’s been a brisk month for Amahi, with the Hottest Pick award from Linux Format, and the FLOSS Weekly interview.  We’ve also had a record number of installs this month. Welcome new users!  If you haven’t done so already, please stop by the community channel and say hello!

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!

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Bookmarks
Sync server for Mozilla Weave. Allows you to sync your Mozilla Firefox bookmarks, passwords, open tabs and history to your Amahi HDA using the Mozilla Weave add-on.
This application sets up a personal sync server for use with the ‘Weave Sync’ add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

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.

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OpenVPN ALS
OpenVPN ALS (project Adito) is a web-based VPN server written in Java. OpenVPN ALS has a browser-based AJAX UI which allows easy access to intranet services. Once installed and configured correctly, you will be able to access all your files and most of the applications on your HDA using your custom Amahi URL (tested with Firefox and Internet Explorer).

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phpLogCon
phpLogCon is a web interface to syslog and other network event data. It provides easy browsing and some basic analysis of realtime network events. Depending on the applications feeding the database, it can process syslog messages, Windows event log entries and even SNMP trap data – just to name a few.

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Cheers!

The Amahi Team!

WHAT!?!? 5.1 is here already? With fewer bugs?

You bet your knickers it is! The 5.1 release brings new and exciting enhancements to the Amahi platform, improving on the 5.0 release (our most successful ever)!

Q: Didn’t you just release 5.0? – A: Yes!

Q: What is new in the Amahi 5.1 release?

A: Have you ever been in an airport and thought “Oh no!! I didn’t turn off the server!”  No worries! You now have the capability of shutting down (or rebooting) your HDA remotely from the dashboard! We also have fixes in user creation, DNS resolution across the VPN, a much improved diskmounter script, improvements to the installer for Amahi in the cloud (VPS – Virtual Private Servers) and more …

Amahi 5.1 also adds Portugese/Portugal support to the supported languages and improves Polish support. We also started the Japanese localization. This will make Amahi supported in 20 languages!

Check out the full list in the release notes or read below for the gory details. In the mean time, as many of you know, we have been discussing how to improve the media server features of Amahi. We continue integration testing on a DNLA server, which is proving to work quite well!

Enjoy the 5.1 release! If you have Amahi 5.0, you get 5.1 automatically. If you have Amahi 4 (Fedora 10) here is a quick guide on transitioning to Amahi 5.

The lowdown of those pesky critters fixed in the 5.1 release ..

A minor bug in the Fedora Project affected our 5.0 release as a result of Fedora 12. Namely you could only create a user with all lower case, there could not be one capital letter we filed bug 550732 though it is believed to be fixed on Fedora 13.

The DNS subsystem will support resolution over the VPN connection to your HDA (this means you can more reliably use your webapps while VPN’d into your HDA). This resolves bug 400 which has been a long standing issue. NO MORE! It’s your network and we’re making it easier for you to use it!

There is a a newly added diskmounter script (called hda-diskmount), bundled out of the box, so  it’s much easier to access than the older one in the wiki. Simultaneously, this substantially improves the way the diskmount script sets up mounts and suggests how to mount them permanently in your HDA!

It’s your network and we help you keep it that way! We have been working hard to bring you the most reliable and secure platform of a home server out there.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team