“Best” Home Server Software

The next release of the Amahi home server platform will be really exciting, and is going to happen really soon! The release will, without doubt, make Amahi the “Best Home Server Software” available.

OK, enough silly talk. I have to write a response to the article at LifeHacker.com. As I write this entry, the article sits with 1106 diggs – and it does not even mention Amahi. Apache even made the list!? That’s just plain weird, as Apache is hard to manage directly by regular humans. Next time a reporter does an investigation of the available Home Servers we expect that they’ll be able to find Amahi!appinstall

Why the confidence? Well, the next release will support one-click installation of apps over the web.

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Update 8.23: fixes to setup pages

Included in this release is a fix for a minor bug that affected some new Amahi users where they could not access the setup pages in their Amahi HDA dashboard. updates

Announce: New Platform, User Management

Exciting news!

We are announcing one of Amahi‘s most important point releases to date (v8.22).

The impact of this release will be barely noticed by most Amahi users, but it lays the foundation to make Amahi accesible to a much wider user base. OK, that might be a little dramatic; there is one feature all users will see, User Management shown in this screenshot (with the Agedashi theme)

User Management

The new features introduced in this release, technically known as hda-platform-0.97, has prompted the re-engineering of a substantial part of the platform software, which will allow future growth and more sophisticated features (e.g. integrating LDAP management). It also will allow apps to create their own tabs in the setup area! (We don’t have a demo app for this usage of the API, … any takers? 🙂 )

Here is a new user being created:

New User Creation

Once users are created, they can be deleted, which will delete all their files, and the full name can be changed by simply clicking on the name.

Edit User Name

Among other smaller feature enhancements, we include:

  • The “Computers” tab has been renamed to “Networking” based on user feedback (it makes more sense this way).
  • Beginning support for LDAP management
  • Beginning support for automatic submission of debug logs

We hope you enjoy this and look forward to bringing you more features that take advantage of this new codebase!

Big thanks to Gerald and Roland for the help and encouragement in bringing this new release to fruition.

Update 8.20: platform software tweaks

A small but important feature is included to the platform software to pave the way for major new features.
updates
This allows upgrading the DB schema easily when needed on upgrades. Also included is a fix to the default authentication mechanism for Samba to shared. A new share is also included for the default location for windows or other backups.

Technically, the platform software is updated to version 0.96-4. The hdactl software is upgraded to version 2.13.

Updates: platform, iHama theme, slideshow

A bunch of Amahi updates today, finxing a variety of relatively small issues.

updates

One of them (in the platform) has been outstanding for a while and it was very annoying. Thanks to Mitch Davenport for contributing it and Steve Sennett for helping us nail this one by providing a reproducible environment to debug and fix it.

  • platform 0.92:
    • Fix issue where a dvd mounted could cause the setup screen to show as an error. Unfortunately, the fix is not a great solution and it may break again in the future. The problem is when mounted disks have special characters in the name, apparently, Linux reports them escaped in /etc/mtab (like a space is \040), which means the file we try to find is not found
    • Fix install scriplet failure to use full path
  • iHama theme 1.1:

    • Fix some CSS styling issues with application tables
    • Fix size of the thumbnail to be the standard 64×64
  • slideshow 0.26:

    • Better support for PicLens
    • Render the MediaRSS feed and the slideshow in alphanumerical order, so the pictures show in the order in which the directories show
    • Ignore image files whose name starts with a dot (Mac OS X generates lots of these for its own thumbnails)

As usual, the theme and the app need to be clicked (installed) in the MyApps page, to pick up the updates.