[Asterisk-Users] Best Linux for Asterisk

[Leif Madsen]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 10:22:53 -0400, Deon Rodden <drodden at webunited.net> wrote:
> It may sound bad, but I use Fedora Core 1.

I don't think it sounds bad.  I'm using FC2.  I really like it.  I
haven't done a lot of the advanced stuff on it yet, but zaptel and
Asterisk compiled fine with the stock kernel (after doing a yum
update).  I'm using ztdummy on a PII 350 and MeetMe conferencing
works.  Haven't installed Festival (I tried it once, and found it
fairly unusable for an auto-attendent, and had no other uses in
scripts for it).  Will probably test MOH in the next couple of days.

> However, I installed using
> reiserfs (my preferred filesystem) and I installed all the updates and had
> to custom compile a new kernel (as the stock one that comes with Fedora is
> too screwy, and the sources aren't done right and certain programs wouldn't
> compile). However, once I did the updates and used a custom compiled kernel,
> everything runs fast/smooth on it.  I haven't had an issue compiling
> anything Asterisk related, yet. I did have issues with my Redhat 9 server,
> and my OpenNA 1.0 server.  Of course, I have put a lot of security and
> performance tweaks into my Fedora installation, had to make it "less redhat"
> but now it runs good.

Obviously whatever works, works.  However, this is what I did to get
my system running on FC2:

- Install FC2 *only* with [X] Development Tools, [X] Kernel Sources
(not really needed as you compile against the build directory, but
nice to have anyways), [X] Editors

- Once installed, do a yum update
- Reboot to make new kernel active
- cd /usr/src/
- Verify that /usr/src/linux-26 is pointed to /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/ 
 ^^^ This should get updated when installing the new kernel, but
always good to verify it did update the link and isn't pointing to the
old build directory
- Checkout Asterisk and Zaptel from CVS
- cd /usr/src/zaptel ; make clean ; make linux26 ; make install
- cd /usr/src/asterisk ; make clean ; make install

I didn't have to do anything fancy to get this to work.  Perhaps I
just got lucky, but I think a lot of the problems people find on FC2
is not keeping the system clean at first.  After doing this, I did yum
install's for httpd, mysql-server and dhcpd.  I even compiled
phpmyadmin for mysql-server interface.  Everything is still running
great after at least 2 weeks of use.  This is not a fancy computer
either, scrap PII 350 parts with 256 MB of RAM (wait... 192MB, had a
bad RAM stick in there...)

> Just a FYI. I think you'll find that as long as your favorite distro is
> decent, Asterisk will work.

Agreed.  The *best* Linux distro is the one you are most comfortable with.

Thanks,
Leif Madsen.
http://www.asteriskdocs.org