Amahi Blog

Today, as we’re going through what we hope is the last week of testing for Amahi 6, we’re happy to announce the Amahi Ready™ program for hardware vendors and our first partnership in this program, by way of Evo Technologies, a Korean manufacturer of eco-friendly computer systems.

This is the first partnership for an off-the-shelf system with Amahi pre-installed, something that has been in big demand among Amahi users.

So if you’ve wanted to buy Amahi pre-installed, Evo Technologies is shipping the first system worldwide today. Meet the ECOPC N.1!

Green. Silent. Small.
The N.1 uses 10~11W at idle, 16W at full CPU load with 2.5″ SSD (18W with 2.5″ HDD) and less than 1W at standby. It uses about 90% less power than standard PC. It saves on electric bills and reduces the environmental impact of CO2 emissions. The N.1 can be operated with a small fan, or totally fanless, therefore you don’t need to worry about a fan failing. No fan means no noise!

Facebook Likes, UPSs, FlexRAID and WOL, Wiki improvements

What an amazing few weeks we had. Amahi’s Facebook page has been abuzz with all sorts of suggestions and discussions. Everything from an energy saving feature, flexraid, UPS integration, and Wake-on-LAN (WOL) were discussed!

The Race to 1K and redesigned Facebook page!

The race to 1,000 Likes is on! Who do you know that could use Amahi? It’s our new goal here at Amahi, WE NEED 1,000 fans! So go out tell a friend or two, whether they have our platform installed or not, to jump on Facebook and Like us! So while you’re there check out the redesigned page! We like the increased fluidity of the page and how it feels more like a personal users page!

WOL, FlexRAID and UPS Integration

Amahi is all about variety and choice. Many people do not know much about using Wake-on-LAN (WOL). WOL is implemented for devices with DHCP leases and Static IPs, under Setup > Networking. This was introduced to Amahi last year, and you can “wake” devices remotely with it. Great for the highly resourceful user!

FlexRAID is a highly scalable and smart storage system currently in beta that turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into storage pools and storage pools into storage clouds.

Amahi Energy Saver is a project to make devices more energy-efficient. This project got an update and has a determined leader (hi jackrock!) and looks like it will be nicely integrated with Amahi! It’s in alpha, however, we hope to take it a step further to make energy savings part of the Amahi platform.

Recently we’ve also had an update on how to integrate a UPS with Amahi. Ghuiber’s efforts are documented in the Amahi Wiki under UPS setup.

Wiki Upgrades

If you followed those wiki links above you will have no doubt noticed the huge improvements in how the wiki looks and feels, with great looking templates for code, links, and easy to use notices. The speed at which the wiki changes is quite remarkable! And the amount of spam we get now in it has been curbed down big time. Take a moment to thank people improving the wiki and especially our wiki czars, smystaki and bigfoot65, for making all these great documentation improvements possible!

You told us what you think

Our goal with Amahi is to provide an easy, reliable, and expandable software platform for all of you.  We’ve asked the Facebook followers this: “What do you use Amahi for?”,  the answers probably seem familiar to most of you:

• Media Server
• VPN Server
• File Server
• App Server

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Wow! We are blown away with the innovative ways in which the community responded to the theme and app contest!

We got 9 new themes, which we are releasing live today (screenshots below) and we even have a top notch VoIP/PBX app, FusionPBX and a hot full-disk backup solution, Redo Backup, in progress!

Today we bring you this: The winners, the features, and … a new Amahi release!

Amahi 5.5!

Amahi 5.5 brings a guest dashboard for non-logged in users, a few fixes and some better networking and app support, along with Wake-on-LAN/WOL. Also included is an update in Greyhole with some bug fixes. Thank you for reporting and testing them!

And the Winners are …

Without further ado, look at the new features the new themes brought on: vertical tabs, mobile support, highlights in rows, nicely shaped tabs, … even an Easter egg in the theme! These innovations result in a smoother looking, cleaner dashboard, just another step forward in the evolution of Amahi.  Kudos to the individuals who contributed, you are another reason why the Amahi community is a great place!

The entries for the theme and app contest came from Florida, Indiana, Germany, Georgia, the Netherlands, Canada and Texas!

One of the biggest new features in a theme is Ben Wyatt’s Touch Theme that integrates mobile functionality, allowing for better control and improved rendering in iPhone/iPod/Android/WebOS devices. Check out our wiki for how to mod your Android based phone or iPhone to add VPN capabilities. What’s better than controlling your server from your phone?

Coming up!

What’s coming up? Amahi 6, with a whole slew of new features! Amahi 6 will leverage new features and advancements of Ruby on Rails 3.0 (released yesterday BTW). Amahi 6 will incorporate performance improvements, javascript helpers, cross site scripting protection, and very cool Amahi Gadgets and Widgets. More on this soon!

Enjoy the screenshots below, and congratulations to the winners and runner-ups! Can’t wait to see what you guys do with your new Plug Computer!

Touch Theme submitted by Ben Wyatt

Ocean Theme submitted by MartinF

On the Horizon submitted by slm4996

Celestial Theme submitted by SolaR

Zombie Parade submitted by llamallama

Carbon Theme submitted by MartinF

Shades of Grey submitted by slm4996

Chupacabra Theme submitted by the one and only Chupacabra

Colorus Theme submitted by Guillaume Boudreau

Sheeva theme launched to kick off the Theme Contest

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.

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.

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!