Complete Asterisk Newb needs help - baby steps

[eherr9633]

I want to learn how to use Asterisk. Basically, I have optimum online triple play at home and I have an ubuntu laptop. I am going to install Asterisk on it but I want to know what additional equipment I need; free is better. I basically need bottom up help; baby steps.

Thanks

 

[busster]

Nothing else is needed as long as laptop has network card.

You can go through and install Asterisk on ubuntu, or download something like Trixbox, Elastix, or AsteriskNow.

Just based on the size and support from the user forum, I would suggest Trixbox.

Nice user interface. Centos, Asterisk, Mysql, Apache, and Postfix are all installed from one ISO. I would suggest using the 2.6 and let others bleed on the 2.8 for a while.

You still have access to the command line so you can learn, but you can have a working system in an hour.

Download a softphone like X-Lite to put on another PC, build an extension, and start playing.

SIP trunks are relatively cheap if you want to access the outside world and require no hardware investment.

 

[garyb2008]

Yea im a newbie to and installed trixbox recently, (i also opted for version 2.6 as the concensus seems to be avoid 2.8 until the bugs are ironed out.) Note this is a distro so your hardrive will be wiped and OS replaced with CentOS 5.x. and when you boot it up theres no X Windows just a command prompt

The idea is you instal Trixbox on a spare PC on a LAN, then point a webbrowser from another PC to it to access the web admin which gives your a gui to set everything up on.

Ive never heard of 'optimum online triple play', i presume its a voip provider, if youve got a sip account or iax account with them you can setup asterisk to connect to it. You may or may not be able to have multiple calls at the one time, depends on your voip provider and account. Also, bandwidth/quality of your internet connection would come into play here, search for voip test on google for a java simulation test.

You can then instal a softphone such as the free X-Lite on all the PCs on the LAN, point it to your asterisk server's ip so you can use it as a phone with an standard PC headset.

There may be a way to instal Trixbox without the distro, though you'd also need to check it will work on Ubunto.

Support forums are very responsive at

http://www.trixbox.org.

I followed a community guide to set mine up called Trixbox 2 Without Tears, skipping the extra features i did not need.

The web admin Trixbox actually uses is a software package called FreePBX, another open source project for managing asterisk config.

Alternatively you may want to setup the asterisk software itself on your ubuntu, this would be beyond me as im not a linux guy, but O'Reilly have a free book on Asterisk, see the html version at

http://astbook.asteriskdocs.org/en/2nd_Edition/asterisk-book-html-chunk/index.html

(about version 1.4 of Asterisk)

 

[garyb2008]

Just to add, the first time i setup Trixbox was on a virtual machine. You can download Sun VirtualBox for free, then download the Trixbox iso, open up virtualbox follow the wizard to boot the iso. Its advised you dont put asterisk into production under a vm due to its need for a hardware clock and performance issues, but its great for a nosey! Your virtual trixbox and the PC you have can be setup so that they behave like they are 2 PCs connected by a network, this is the trickiest bit i found to setup. You can then access the trixbox web admin page from a browser on the pc typing in the virtual ip address that is created for you.

 

[ciscobuy]

If you want to learn Asterisk, I'd strongly suggesting getting very comfortable with basic Linux administration first. If you aren't comfortable with Linux it's tough to get started with Asterisk. From there, I'd suggest setting up a basic server with Centos, install Asterisk from source, add Asterisk GUI if you want a GUI.

Trixbox is great and has its place but there are no shortcuts if you really want to learn Asterisk.

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