Another Competitor - This is getting pretty busy!

Just tripped over Amahi.

From a quick perusal of their website, it's a home-server type setup currently in beta- with a twist.

Currently based on Fedora 8, with plans to support Fedora 9, CentOS and Ubuntu.
They want you to 'sign up' before you install, and they have a Terms of Service section that mentions 'premium services' It looks like remote management is their 'secret ingredient', and they want to monetize things at one point or another. Nothing wrong with that, but not the direction I'm interested in heading at this point.

They do have some cool bullet point features, like compatibility with Vista's built in calendars (which I know nothing about) and Apple iCals.

Also interesting was they have a backup service called 'PPA' that seems to be a combination of partimage a and network booting, ala clonezilla. So, you just reboot, hit F12 to boot from the network and pick either backup or restore. Pretty slick.

But, (getting on my soapbox), you have to manually reboot and trigger the backup. In my experience if you leave backups to the end users, they don't get done. My wife, for instance, is not interested in a process like this, and wouldn't be likely to get it done regularly. I'd rather have something I can schedule so nobody has to worry about it.

At any rate, Amahi looks like interesting competition, and a good source for ideas if nothing else.