Ever tried to installed Linux on an ALIX board?
It is not that difficult if you have ordered an ALIX board with a monitor out. I’ve purchased me a second board. The 3D3 ALIX. It is similar to the 3D2 but has monitor out, mic and audio.
I wanted to get Asterisk 1.6 running on the box. Prefered linux distribution from Digium is CentOS 5. Digium is providing an online repo for the current builds and updates of asterisk. As the ALIX boards are based upon a 586 architecture i wasn’t able to install CentOS 5.4. With the 4.8 version everything was successful but you cannot use the Digium repository for the asterisk builds. So i decided to use a different distribution.
Currently i have tested Fedora 12, as it is supporting the ALIX boards even if it is a 686 architecture based linux distribution. Built in comes a Asterisk 1.6 repository. For the installation i took the netinstall iso-image. I made one large ext3 partition for root. I didn’t made a swap partition as the compact flash cards have limited read/write cycles. I installed only the mimimum required packages.
At the moment the Asterisk PBX is running perfect. I’ll do a reinstall in the next days due to upgrade to Fedora 13 (coming in the next 19 days).
You are now asking why i didn’t use Askozia (http://www.askozia.com)? Askozia is an imaged based Asterisk, just copy the image file to CF card and boot from it. I’m using asterisk mainly for two functions: PBX and Mediagateway for Microsoft OCS. OCS is using TCP SIP. So i need to convert TCP SIP to UDP SIP. Askozia is at the moment not able to use TCP SIP trunks. Maybe this will change in the future.
Stay tuned for updates on the project.