Amahi Blog

Hello! Here is an update on three areas! Test repo for F11, Roadmap and Some recent Bugfixes.

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First, the team is happy to announce the availability of the new

Fedora 11 development repo, codenamed Quantum

Quantum, ’cause it’s not quite there — Thanks Mithran ..

This is an ALPHA repo, located at f11.amahi.org. We have been working on setting up this repo for a few days now and it’s starting to shape up.

This repo is:

• known to be broken unless otherwise stated
• 32bit only for now
• for development and testing only, during the next few weeks
• will only work with the kickstart method of installation, hence it will TAKE OVER AND FORMAT your entire hard drive for use in your test HDA, though, if you are working with Virtual Machines, you can snapshot the base install and use the manual method for much faster speed in development (see the wiki)
• will only work with the new installer

If you are up for some rough testing, please check it and help debug Amahi!

We will use the Fedora 11 wiki page to communicate and note the major issues, status, etc.

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As for roadmap, this Fedora 11 release is ambitious, as we want to:

• move to rails 2.3 and mod_rails, phusion passenger
• want to password protect the setup pages with amahi user authentication
• have a mysql password that it’s separate from the platform
• better support for server based apps
• much easier native app architecture, using rails engines

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Finally, we wanted to share a quick note that we had to release a quick fix for the Amahi daemon, to fix Bug 333, which could cause trouble upon installation in some small percentage of cases, under Fedora 10.

As you know, 333 is half of 666, so we did not want to let it linger to too long …

The fix is hdactl version 2.44-7.

The Fedora 11 repo is in much better shape today after some fixes went into the new installer, and we have seen some Kickstart installs, however, it’s not entirely functional yet.

As usual, come by the community channel to get the latest scoop!

Having revamped the website and prepared “behind the scenes” for scaling to serve thousands of users, the core team at Amahi has turned its attention to the most important thing — the Amahi HDA.

Before delving into some detail, first a comment on our goal. Ultimately we want the Amahi HDA to be for the average user to manage their home network. Of course we cannot do this straight away. Initially we have focused on the power users – to help build a robust offering. With some core functionality still to come (web based user and share management) we have started planning “what next?”

This is where the feedback from our beta users has been incredibly valuable. With close to a thousand responses to the question of desired functionality – a media server is the overwhelming feature request. The graph here summarises the results. In any case, we are very open to individual opinions and contributors so let us know your thoughts!

The team believes in the simple mantra “release early, release often” rather than aiming for the perfect code first time, so expect more in the near future!