[Asterisk-Users] which distro for asterisk?

[Deon Rodden]

We discussed this earlier and I believe the general consensus was that 
it's personal choice. I've personally used Asterisk on Redhat 9.0, 
Fedora Core 1 and Gentoo 2004.2

Each has required some minor securing and cleaning up, but Redhat/Fedora 
tended to need more "babying" as far as securing default configs and 
speeding up certain things. But after a little bit of time with it, I 
had it running efficient and Asterisk loved it. The main problem I found 
with Redhat/Fedora was the default kernel, the sources are all messed up 
and the zaptel/libpri drivers didn't compile quite right. I simply 
downloaded the latest kernel, compiled it (and set it to my specific 
hardware to conserve memory) and libpri/zaptel compiled fine.

Personally I'm now using Gentoo. What I did with Gentoo was "emerge 
asterisk-0.9.0" or whatever, and it handled all the dependencies for 
more. When I was done with that, I did a "emerge cvs" and once I had cvs 
I downloaded, compiled and upgraded to the latest 
libpri/zaptel/asterisk, just did a make upgrade. Gentoo tends to be a 
faster OS and more efficient with resources, it gives you bare minimum. 
Which sometimes is good, for security and such, but also a pain when it 
comes to standard interaction. ie by default they don't include "ftp" or 
"telnet" and "traceroute" just commands I'm used to having, nothing I 
can't emerge though.

In the end, it's personal choice. For now I've gone with Gentoo. 
Asterisk really isn't that resource intensive, it seems to like memory a 
lot, but other than that I don't see it putting heavy loads on my 
systems, and the speed difference between two identical machines, one 
with with Fedora Core 1 and one with Gentoo, is almost imperceivable 
when it comes to working with Asterisk, (ie, the IVR and playback of 
messages, and interacting with the voicemail system, etc.).

Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

>Hi
>
>I want to play a bit with Asterisk. I currentlly install a new system
>for that and I would like to get your recommendations regarding the
>linux distro to use there.
>
>This is NOT intended to become a general distro flame war. My favorite
>distro is ******** and no argument that you flame will convince me here
>(probably because I've heard it before).
>
>However I would like to minimize the OS maintinance task. I really
>wouldn't like to start worrying about upgrading sshd due to some stupid
>secuirty hole, and to worry what will it break on my system. I expect my
>distro to do that for me. 
>
>I'd also like to have solid astrisk packages that won't break
>unnecessarily when the sshd package is updated next time. Hopefully also
>some sort of integration of zaptel in the distro's kernel package.
>
>I saw numerous complaints about "unofficial" RPM packages of asterisk.
>Besides them, the following free distros include asterisk packages:
>
>1. Debian: http://packages.debian.org/asterisk . 
>2. Gentoo: Current package seems to be version 0.9.0 from 10-May-2004
>3. The DAG repository for RH/Fedora:
>   http://dag.wieers.com/packages/asterisk/
>
>I have some experince with Debian, Mandrake and RedHat/Fedora. I'm
>unfamiliar with Gentoo and I have no good/bad experince with DAG
>packages with respect to quality and stability.
>
>Any recommendations, relevant experince and other learned opinions?
>
>thx
>
>  
>