New beta of the Mac OS X VPN client

After testing a new release (beta 10) of the Mac VPN client Tunnelblick, we thought we’d post this update notice for all of you Amahi Mac and VPN users.
Tunnelblick VPN Client For Mac OS X

It seems to fix a number of issues (release notes), most notably some periodic disconnects of the tunnel connection that some users experienced.

Go get it!

Screencast on Web Apps

Check out this screencast by famed Amahi Team member DevAuto on how to instantiate and deploy a web app. This web app is a nice file browser called AjaXplorer:

As we mentioned recently, we are going to shift into looking at applications, integrating them in a plug-in fashion. This screencast shows how easy it is to instantiate and deploy a web app within the Amahi home server.

There are generally two parts in deploying a web app:

  1. Creating a new app in the Web Apps area of the setup pages of your HDA
  2. Copying the app code to the root of the app you just created!

Of course, the app will take over from there. Each app will have its own settings, etc.

Improved User and Share Management

I know you’ve all been waiting eagerly. I know that we’ve been promising it, so here it is, the newest and greatest release of Amahi! Check out the screenshot of the share management interface.

Share Creation Screenshot

The platform is now ready to start exploring adding new applications. Improvements since the last release include:

  • streamlined user creation
  • fully functioning share creation, including “per user” visibility and read/write control
  • a further improved installation process (covering some short-comings in Fedora 9)
  • desktop icons for better access after install to your HDA’s setup and Amahi support
  • various little bug fixes – not worth mentioning the specifics in the blog 😉

We’re going back to the feedback early users gave on the applications they’d like to see on the platform. We’ve had them working in the lab, now we’re going to start focussing on media servers, specifically UPnP and DLNA to support a whole range of devices. (We will test with Xbox and Play Station – I’ve been looking for an excuse to go and buy a new game console!

In parallel, a whole group of users have started testing various GroupWare applications on Amahi. We’re collecting the feedback, and aim to streamline the install process (even beyond the WebApps configuration now available.) Stay tuned for more!

On another topic, Amahi is slowly emerging from “under the radar” — Linux.com published a great little article on Amahi . No doubt adding new apps to the platform will raise our profile – if there are some favorite apps you’d like to see, let us know!

You can reach us at the support email, the IRC channel or the user or developer mailing lists.

Many thanks to all the community for helping testing things out, and making suggestions for improvement in this release!

Technically, this release is made up of the following releases:

hda-platform-1.10
hdactl-2.27