Amahi Blog

Hello! Rumors of our demise to Apple were greatly exaggerated

We’re extremely happy to announce the third Alpha release of Amahi for Ubuntu.

This release supports Ubuntu 11.10, and paves the way for supporting the next LTS (Long Term Support) release, 12.04.

Support for 32 and 64 bits is included, as well as ARM support, having been run on the PandaBoard!

We’re also confident it probably works well on systems like the BeagleBoard and similar boards. We’re looking to also port Amahi on the upcoming launch of the Raspberry Pi $25 boards in the coming weeks.

These probably make the most compact and power efficient Amahi systems yet!

Note that this is still alpha and takes some MAD SKILLZ to install.

Many thanks go to Frans (better known as eFfeM, our team lead for Ubuntu, who is back with a vengeance) and the rest of you that helped test Amahi on Ubuntu with this great new release!

Go get it!

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

Konnichiwa!

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.

On Monday, Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols over at LinuxPlanet.com, asked where is Linux’s answer to Microsoft’s Small Business Server. He also wondered why, when most distributions come with all of the server software needed to make something similar, Linux is not used more often.

We know the answer to the first question: Amahi!

In all truth, Amahi is fast becoming an SMB, SOHO and workgroup server. Recently the 4.0 release added Primary Domain Controller functionality and VPN has been a stable feature for a long long time, and we have a lot of SMB-ready apps. The community is looking at organizing the feature requests for the new releases in Amahi’s roadmap.

The answer to the second is that while Amahi is wonderful and works very well, relatively few people know about it. Like many other open source projects, Amahi has a lack of resources. The subject of an official port of Ubuntu for Amahi keeps coming up. It is a wonderful idea. Still, we have had some Ubuntu developers working on the Ubuntu port on and off. Most developers have seriously underestimated the job and sooner or later they lose interest. We need to pool interest! We do have lots of volunteers for testing it!

Another idea is for an Amahi hardware device. Something that could be plugged in, the install code entered, and a few minutes later, voila! An Amahi server for home or business. The off-the-shelf technology for such a venture is such that a device like this is possible in a price range that would make it competitive with other NAS products such as Dlink’s DNS-323; Newegg’s most reviewed NAS product. The next version of Amahi will be more ready to take vendors input for bundling in hardware solutions!

How do we as the core of the Amahi user base, change this?

Number one: Blog about Amahi! Number two: Tweet and retweet! Number three: Post in Facebook!

Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols’ email address is readily available at Linux Planet: write to him and tell him that such a product exists! Trumpet Amahi’s features and ease of use! Tell your own story, like many in our testimonials page! Write a one liner with a link to Amahi! Whatever! Just let him know.

Finally, find an Ubuntu developer friend and let him know what we have and that we need their help! All he or she can say is no. And even if he or she says no, ask them if they know a developer that is looking for a project. Talk to them long enough and Amahi will stick with them even if they don’t contribute.

This project is in our hands. We are going to make or break it. If we get the word out, people will start to come around to something better, namely Amahi.

Let’s make Amahi become everything it can become!

The Amahi team is happy to announce a major new release of the Amahi platform!

A little while in the making, with stability and usability in mind, it brings the goal is a little closer:

          Making Home Networking Simple!

In just a handful of weeks that the app gallery has been open, we have reached close to 50 apps live, over 25 apps are in beta, with over 12.000 app installs to date.

Version 4.0 of the Amahi platform (for Fedora 10 only) hit the wires yesterday. It brings support for Primary Domain Controller, a new module system to remotely control your router/firewall, ability for apps to create their own servers and shares, and more!

Read on for all the details, but before that … A Call To Action!

We get feedback that we need more marketing! We’d like to ask you, our user community, to help publicize Amahi and this new release, with your friends, in your favorite forums, in twitter (yes, we’re @amahi!), in Facebook/MySpace/FriendFeed/etc. and any other forums you like!

If you know any blog, magazine, user group or media outlet that would find it of interest to interview or otherwise report on the latest from Amahi, get in touch with the team or the community!

Now let’s get right to the new features!

• Improved Dashboard and Setup UI
• Primary Domain Controller
• Router and Firewall control
• New application features
• Servers
• Other things going on

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Improved Dashboard and Setup

Our dashboard and setup pages have changed. The Dashboard can handle many more applications and it looks better. Under Setup, there is now a new Settings tab for controlling advanced settings and router control. There are also user interface improvements in it. When installing an application, the special instructions for that app are shown immediately.

With Advanced Settings enabled, a few other options for more sophisticated features show up under the Shares tab and the Applications tab. Router control is also under settings, as an in-development feature (shows up under networking when it’s enabled).

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PDC

One of the most demanded feature included in this release is that you now have the capability to run your HDA as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC).

PDC allows your HDA to control the features and application permissions your users may be granted access to in their computers, with the use of a single username and password combination. It also does things like mapping/mounting all the common shares automatically. This is why it is regarded as more of an “enterprise” feature.

This is especially beneficial to small businesses, home offices, and (sophisticated) parents!

Read more on how to use the Amahi PDC feature (note that it requires the pro/business versions of Windows).

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Router and Firewall Control

This feature allows you to remotely control your router or firewall from the HDA setup pages. This feature is modular (if there is a module for your router/firewall, you can control it from your HDA, with no need to forward ports manually through VPN, etc.).

This feature is under development. Popular requested modules are open-wrt/dd-wrt and UPnP.

Help us out on this feature! It only involves writing some ruby code to interface the more popular routers and firewalls.

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New Application Features

Applications may come with their own server and their own share. This is so that, for example, a bittorrent downloader can put files in its own share, and run as it’s own server, and be controlled by the user! A few apps already take advantage of this, like of the most popular apps, uShare and Transmission. More will take care of this going forward, which makes things easier to use and set up!

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Servers

A new section under Applications allows control and monitor the various servers running in your HDA, such as uShare, DNS server, DCHP server (a long requested feature), VPN server, etc.

This means you can now more easily monitor and easily control what’s happening. Remember it’s your network! Run it like you mean it!

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What else is going on, you ask?

A few popular applications are out, including one, eyeOS, which is an entire Operating System in your browser, yes you read that right!

In the development front we have …

The Ubuntu port of Amahi is in development under the guidance of @kprav33n. This is very exciting. We will need testers for the Ubuntu port pretty soon!

The Fedora 11 update is now under way, with at least two F11 machines running in testing. Fedora 11 was announced in May and it looks stable.

And a little native app called ServerTweet that sends alerts on disk and bandwidth usage, programs running, temperature levels via Twitter is also nearing release. Pretty cool!

Big thanks to our community and our testing group. This update went very smoothly!
We are well on our way to developing the next platform thanks to the community members Rampage537, BK, cpg, GeraldW, pjcrux, Bigfoot65 and others for the help and support!

OK, OK, we will do more frequent (and smaller!) updates!

Carlos
for the entire Amahi Team and Community