So this post is from 3 years ago and a lot of the comments didn’t believe it would happen. But it appears to be happening now.
Will FreePBX move to a new base OS?
1 Like
I’m curious to know about it as well. The Rocky Linux people seemed optimistic, while AlmaLinux sounded a bit less upbeat. What is the status of the new base OS for FreePBX?
I shared two links in my OP. I searched the forum before posting and the only link that I was able to find was several years old. Thank you for sharing.
We are also working to upgrade all our servers this year, and it would be ideal if the Sangoma team could at least provide a rough timeline on when the new OS is expected to deliver.
Determining what OS to use is a big part of this, however, beyond that factor there are many other factors that inhibit how fast a move to a new OS can take. Many in this community have already voice concern about the fact many of the dependencies of SNG7 (and previous distro’s) have been throwing deprecation warnings when doing updates. The issue that exists now is that newer OS releases are no longer letting EOL or long deprecated versions, etc. exist in the OS.
That alone will require any dependency to have to be updated to a more current version, which could impact how it is configured or how it performs (such as older features/settings no longer exist or newer ones being added). There could be even a case where something being used can’t be ported so a replacement will need to be found or even worse, removal.
Right now FreePBX v17 hasn’t seen any development. All the modules are still at the 17.0.1 initial version when pulling from the development repos. Framework now requires PHP 8.1 for it to install but the Distro development environment currently doesn’t have PHP 8.1 available to install on distro based development machines and the Sangoma RPMs conflict with any PHP 8.1 repo when trying to install PHP8.1 on its own.
It’s all a bit concerning…
2 Likes
On the open-source side of FreePBX, it works beautifully on Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04. However, Rocky 8 is problematic at best and Rocky 9 is currently unworkable. Debian 12 is also currently unworkable. Rocky 9 and Debian 12 have moved away from iptables which is another complication and so far, I don’t see any backports for PHP-7.4. You still are dealing with obsolete NPM and other products required for FreePBX. If they do not modernize quickly, the product will be left behind.
So both the FreePBX distro and the open-source versions are going to take a lot of work to move forward.
1 Like
Yeah, I am feeling there are bigger issues at play here. It would be nice to hear from Sangoma directly, but I don’t know what barriers are stopping that. VitalPBX has moved to Debian 11. It is not a 1 for 1 comparison, and they don’t have the infrastructure baggage of the more mature FreePBX platform, but I cannot keep telling stakeholders “no news”.
What’s the issue with Debian 12? “Unworkable” is a pretty strong statement; maybe just needs some cleverness and elbow grease?? I say this having not yet tried Deb12 but having had great success on versions since Debian 8.
I can attest to that, we have been running FreePBX as well as Kamailio on Deb 10 and 11. It’s been rock solid. I am aware of other [commercial] Asterisk based projects that have moved from CentOS to Debian.
2 Likes
The use of CentOS is a sin of our forefathers. It was a stack that trixbox used and everyone sort of ran with. Somewhere you will find reference to the LAMPA stack. Much like a bad marriage you feel bad ending it because you dumped a lot of time and money into it. A lot of the commercial stuff at Sangoma is built around that stack. To step away from it is expensive, time consuming and to be honest may require a skill set they simply don’t have anymore. I get a strong feeling the lack of any movement to one of the clones is for the same reason.
The tl;dr is if you want to use commercial modules you are stuck. If you want it on something newer you will need to go through the legwork and likely submit back bug fixes that somehow fix new stuff but doesn’t break old stuff. Don’t expect any official support doing so.
2 Likes
Yeah, I spun up another server to make a non-distro based dev machine. At least then I can get PHP 8.1 on it.
1 Like
I’ve had great success with Debian 8,9,10 and 11. I spent a few days with Debian 12 but couldn’t figure out how to get older versions of various required components for FreePBX. For example, the Remi RPM repository did not yet offer PHP 7.4 for Debian 12. I have no doubt people will eventually get backports to work with it but am not sure anyone is working it. Also, iptables was not included and I had not yet found a way to get it on that distro.
Debian 11 Bullseye is supported for an undefined period longer, estimated to be July 2024 to possibly June of 2026. I’m staying with Debian 11 until such time people smarter than me figure out backporting necessary libraries and programs for Debian 12. There are challenges for IncrediblePBX with its included packages as well and that will have to be addressed for that distro.
Sadly, there is tons of work needed by Sangoma to bring FreePBX up to speed with Asterisk releases. Will they hold back from using any Asterisk version that has eliminated macros? When will NPM, nodejs, cache, and other associated components be brought up to current rev levels? They’re falling way behind in staying current.
1 Like
I think maybe some of the confusion here is it’s Sangoma OS not FreePBX. What does that mean? Unless things changed in the last few years numerous sangoma products were all using and sharing the same core Sangoma OS.
I know most people here only think in the small world of FreePBX but 80-90% of Sangoma business is not FreePBX. It’s a lot of other products that have nothing at all to do with FreePBX or Asterisk.
Heck their largest product in revenue which is 50% of their revenue or more uses FreeSwitch and not Asterisk being the UCaaS products from Star2Star and all the VoIP Innovations stuff.
2 Likes
But the point remains, how long can Sangoma OS remain equitable ?
1 Like
As a small business owner who’s been at this since Trixbox, but is not a phone expert, this worries me. Am I going to find my phones not working some day and nowhere to turn? I set up our FreePBX but I don’t consider myself a programmer and I’m certainly less educated regarding Linux than most of the people here. I contribute what I can but admittedly it’s not much.
But… reading this thread is pretty scary to someone like me and I think there are a lot of people like me using FreePBX. Do you have any comforting words for those us us who are non-professionals phone people? I mean, other than “hire me”. LOL
1 Like
Keeping existing systems in place is not the problem/worry here.
It’s “What’s the future of Sangoma OS?” that’s being discussed here. What system are new future systems that run on Sangoma OS going to be using and how do we get there?
And @lgaetz said that it’s being discussed internally in this separate post:
1 Like
FusionPBX is one option, similar to FreePBX but uses FreeSwitch instead of Asterisk. Vital PBX is another option. While there is a free version, there would likely be costs, but the project (frankly) looks really good and well supported.
Opensource FreePBX works just fine on Debian, and likely always will.
So long as you are not using FreePBX commercial modules, there are many users running Asterisk/FreePBX on Debian 10 and 11 as well as Ubuntu 22.04. An alternative to running the FreePBX distro (without the commercial modules) could be IncrediblePBX-2027. It has options to run on Debian or Ubuntu.
1 Like