Keeping your network updated with a new round of apps!

The Amahi App team has been at it again!  No, not another marathon (yet!), just a few updates.  Updated to the latest version is Monitorix, the system monitoring tool, which is available live in the Store that houses Amahi Apps.     Also updated are two Beta apps: Feng Office, the web based collaboration suite and phpList, the email campaign manager. We love app updates!

Cheers!

 



MonitorixMonitorix

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitor as many services as possible. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices’ interrupt activity are also monitored, and more. The current status of any corporate server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

 

BETA APP UPDATES: Feng Office and phpList have been updated to the latest version. Enjoy Amahi Pro subscribers!



Feng OfficeFeng Office

Feng Office (formerly OpenGoo) allows businesses to manage project tasks, billing, documents, communication with co-workers, customers and vendors, schedule meetings and events, and share every kind of electronic information.



phplistphplist

phplist is the world’s most popular open source email campaign manager. phplist is easy to integrate with any website.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

New partner, Amahi 6.1 and the Ubuntu Alpha Zero release

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

Meet the ECOPC N.1: Amahi pre-installed, 1000 likes on Facebook!

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

New Apps! vnStat, Ajaxterm and LinPHA

After another round of awesome testing by the Testing Team we are proud to announce the release of new applications for Amahi.

We have a bandwidth monitor app, just in case you want to keep tabs on your internet download cap to keep in check, a nice web-based secure shell (SSH) terminal and a good looking photo gallery app.

Read on for more!


vnstatvnStat
vnStat is a tool which is simple to setup and capable of monitoring your incoming and outgoing bandwidth usage. The default port monitored is eth0, however this may be changed manually.

The output allows you to see the bandwidth you’ve used in a variety of ways, such as by hour, by day, etc. Also, as a bonus it doesn’t require the use of root privileges once it has been installed.


AjaxtermAjaxterm
Ajaxterm is a web based ssh terminal emulator. It was totally inspired and works almost exactly like Anyterm

Ajaxterm is written in python (and some AJAX javascript for the client side) and depends only on python2.3 or better.

Ajaxterm provides a quick way to access the command line interface on your HDA. No more opening putty or a command prompt, it will all be contained in the browser!

One word of caution is that you should set up https for this app to be fully secure.


LinPHALinPHA
LinPHA is an easy to use, multilingual, flexible photo/image archive/album/gallery written in PHP. It uses a MySQL database to store information about your pictures. It’s available as a one-click install, so you don’t even have to run the web-based installer.

This photo gallery application generates thumbnail images on the fly and stores statistical data about images and comments from visitors in a MySQL database.

Many thanks to all the contributors and testers for all your hard work creating and testing apps!

The Amahi Team