Ubuntu

Can I install Amahi on Ubuntu?

The long term goal for Amahi is to be an "easy to use" product rather than "for geeks only."

This is why the Amahi home server is managed through a web 2.0 browser based interface and is designed to run headless. Of course file sharing and related activites are supported cross platform - Linux, Windows and Mac.

The underlying distribution that Amahi is currently built on is Fedora.

There are frequent requests to make an Ubuntu version available - but to date there are not enough "pro-Ubuntu" developers ready to commit to make this happen. As developers get involved they realize that the underlying distribution does not impact the end user experience.

Since Amahi is designed to run headless there is no tangible benefit to port to Ubuntu - the development time is better spent improving Amahi.

With that said - if you are ready to lead the effort, let us know and the team will help get you started.

What To Do

Here are the rough suggested steps to make Amahi on Ubuntu possible.

1. Focus on an installed system first, writing down (say in a wiki page here) the things needed to get things running. Later focus on the installer, which will have many more platform dependencies.
2. Install Ubuntu server
3. Install ruby, rails and the appropropriate gems (write down the exact commands needed to do this)
4. Make the interface work first. Use RoR in development mode on a base amahi platform tree. This should be platform independent.
5. Once the interface is working, install the Amahi control daemon. This will need some hooks to make work under Ubuntu for sure.
6. This will complete the two basic things needed to get the ball rolling. The next one will be applications. This is potentially complex.
7. Finally, the installer (hda-install) will need porting. This will need to be adapted for deb-based systems and also for taking care of all the needed requirements as captured above.
8. After all of this is done, the various parts will need to be packaged as debs and put in a repo for ubuntu
9. Finally, testing, testing, testing! :)

Some open questions/topics:

• Can we somehow live with RPMs in the short term (which is what we have today)? Using something that we have today would make it easier right away, i.e. if we can go with a repo that we already have, it would be a massive step to get started.
• Should we start with ubuntu desktop or ubuntu server? - my first impression would be server, which makes more sense. Any gotchas with that?
• How are updates handled in ubuntu?

Given how there is a lot of learning on both sides, you should probably stop by the #amahi irc channel at irc.freenode.com. At least one or two of the usuals there are also interested in Ubuntu! You can also discuss this in the amahi-devel mailing list.