Wake-on-LAN falls from the sky, no one injured. Go World Cup!

It was one of those brilliant things in life…

Funny things happen in FOSS communities, and Amahi is no exception!

It was a normal to quiet day on the Amahi Community Channel, when an un-named regular said:

“You know what would be cool? a “Wake” button, next to each entry in the Static IPs page.”

Wake-on-LAN (or WOL), standard that allows a computer to be magically turned on or woken up by a network message.

The community wheels really kicked into motion when other team members started searching for icons to use in the dashboard while many others tested some code. Then, before long, the team had a working platform with the new WOL feature to be released in the next update!

Amahi is taking long strides to bring your network back to the land of the free! This is but another step on our path to bring you the best that Amahi can offer!

The World cup championship is this weekend. We hate to pick sides! Really we do! But if we had to well … Our Spain supporters argued that our long term logo had been supporting the Netherlands all along with all that orange, so we decided to give a nudge to Spain for a few days πŸ™‚

Amahi-Spain

OK, we’re a bit biased, as the core team is partly formed by one spaniard πŸ™‚

So sit back, relax, and enjoy friendly competition while two great teams battle each other for the coveted World Cup Trophy!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Amahi 4.0 is alive! PDC, Router Control, … and more!

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

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).


PDC
Welcome to the home domain
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).


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.


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!


Servers
Servers Panel

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!


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.

servertweetAnd 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! πŸ™‚

Carlos
for the entire Amahi Team and Community

The hits keep on comin’!

Version 3.0 of the Amahi platform was released today after a lot of work and testing from the community.
recipes-sshot

Particular thanks for this release go to rampage and gjc1000 for patiently testing in their systems!

Included are more than a dozen improvements, among them

  • bringing the old-style native Amahi web apps to the one-click installer,
  • further improvements to the one-click installer and
  • dashboard improvement to display an unlimited set of apps, now in two columns when there are too many applications, shown below (as some of you have noticed already).

new-dashboard

Now, each app can have one database of its own, and a package per app (RPM only, no DEBs yet), which are managed automatically. Other fixes include eliminating a timed-out page if the app gallery is not reachable (e.g. if there is no networking).

Recipes, seen in a small screenshot above, and Weightwatcher are two of the native apps released!
weightwatcher-sshot

For details check out the commit details, included below after the break for your reading pleasure.

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