Amahi is a Linux-based home server operating system. The OS itself has been supplemented with several applications, including for data management, audio and video streaming and web applications. The developers recently released Amahi 4.0 with the following announcement:
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
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!
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
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 under 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.
And 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!
Carlos
for the entire Amahi Team and Community
| Version number | 4.0 |
| Release status | Final |
| Operating systems | Linux |
| Website | amahi |
| Download | |
| License type | Conditions (GNU/BSD/etc.) |