FreePBX and AsteriskNow 1.7

My company wants to upgrade trixbox to FreePBX and like the idea of installing the whole system from a single ISO with AsteriskNow 1.7.

Can anyone comment on their experiences with AsteriskNow 1.7? Does it give the same install as manually installing CentOS, Asterisk, Dahdi and FreePBX? Thanks in advance for all your help.

It works just fine. If you are already running asterisknow 1.5 all you have to do is yum update and you will be running 1.7 so they just updated some of the rpm packages to CentOS 5.5 and a few other things. Doing it all through yum is the best way to go IMHO so AsteriskNOW gets 2 thumbs up from me.

http://vps.powerpbx.org

Overall I like AsteriskNow 1.7 quite a bit. Most of the issues with 1.5 are gone and the ability to choose Asterisk 1.4 or 1.6 with or without FreePBX is nice.

The only complaint I can come up with is:

Installing G729 and Skype For Asterisk conflicts with addons. I seem to recall needing addons for CDR.

So, if you installed the asterisk-addons, the work around is to yum erase all the addons parts and then do G729 and Skype for Asterisk yum installs.

Next you grab the RPM’s from http://packages.asterisk.org/centos/5/current/i386/RPMS/
and install them like this:

rpm -ivh --force --nodeps asterisk16-addons-core-1.6.2.1-1_centos5.i386.rpm

I think the order was core, mysql and plain addons.

Otherwise not too bad.

Basically we want to end up with a FreePBX 2.8 system that auto updates Asterisk and CentOS from Digium. Sort of like trixbox without the headaches and FreePBX on top.

This distro is working good for me,
Download and burn the ISO image on a CD and simply boot it,
its a 15 min installation
Then configure the IP of your server machine and access the FreePBX 2.7 in no time.

And for modules go to http://mirror.freepbx.org/modules/release/2.7/
all the modules you need are available here.

Thanks for all the comments. I installed AsteriskNow 1.7 and upgraded without any issues to FreePBX 2.8. However the fax module is not working because spandsp or FFA is not installed. Since FFA is a paid solution I prefer spandsp but all our attempts to load it in Asterisk have failed. We installed spandsp .06 and autoload=yes in modules.conf. Do we have to recompile Asterisk to recognize/load spandsp?

I’m new to this, but I thought I’d share my thoughts.

In the last weeks, I have intensively tried the latest versions of: AsteriskNOW, Trixbox, PBX in a Flash, and Elastix.

When you think about it, it’s all the same inside: Centos, Asterisk, and FreePBX.

By far, the AsteriskNOW distro is the cleanest and is my choice.

I quickly discarded PIAF; the install process is clumsy, and unlike what they say it is loaded with bloatware. If you don’t have a fast Internet connection, you’re going to spend the day on it, and my fear is that if you don’t have an Internet connection it will someday stop working because one of their bloody scripts rely on it. I don’t like this. It is over reliant on a live and fast Internet connection; even if they don’t use that to hook you, I still don’t like it.

I discarded Trixbox; although the install process is ok, I did not like the “call home everyday” feature. They’re honest about disclosing it, but it does smell like a trojan horse to get you to the monthly “pro” subscription and lose control over your stuff. There is little bloatware, but still I don’t like these guys knowing everytime I go to the boy’s room. The initial reason I tried Trixbox is because supposedly it would have integrated HUD. Tough luck, the latest version does not support it and I don’t need HUD 3.0 bad enough to pay for it.

I discarded Elastix. The install process is a lot better than PIAF (it’s comparable to ANOW and Trixbox), but there is still a lot of bloatware being installed. Some of it could be tempting, namely the IMAP server and the fax thing, though. It does seem a lot friendlier to non-digium hardware and to foreign languages. But even worse than Trixbox, I don’t like the idea of burying FreePBX underneath a layer of something else. Where in hell is the DAHDI configuration screen gone? I did like some setup options though, such as asking up front for a static IP address (duh), and whether or not you want IPv6 (does not do any good to me now).

In short:

  • The OS is Centos (which in fact is Red Hat), and these is no discussion about it. Although there are some valid alternatives, why bother?

  • Then the most important component is Asterisk, and there is no discussion about that one either. There are no alternatives.

  • Then the interface is FreePBX; even if there is Asterisk GUI, the fact that digium makes FreePBX the first choice in AsteriskNOW and that all the other distros use it makes me go for it.

So, when I chose, I KISSed. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The distro with the less added bloatware is AsteriskNow.

I have some issues with it, but here I go.

my $0.02,
Michel.

Hi Guys,

I am a newbie, I installed the Asterisk now and chose to install asterisk 1.6 with freepbx, after the installation , I am taken to the command line and am asked to point the browser to my IP address, i am not able to lauch firefox from the CLI, could someone pls give a step by step procedure on hpw to launch the browser, I tried lynx but is too mediocre and I am looking foe something better.

i appreciate ur help.

Sandy - Don’t hijack posts with support questions.

To answer your question you need to run the browser on another computer, not the server running FreePBX and Asterisk.