[Asterisk-Users] Softfax/spandsp

[Steve Underwood]

Hi all,

After a long time having no time, I have finally done some fresh work on 
my software fax machine. I have replaced the original carrier tracking 
with something more robust. I have also added 4800, and 2400 bits per 
second modes, and cleaned up a few bugs in areas like superfine mode 
operation. I apologise for this update taking so long.

At ftp://ftp.opencall.org/pub/spandsp you will find a new version of the 
software. You will need TIFF version 5.5.7 or later installed on your 
machine. Make sure no earlier version is there - they seem to cause 
crashes. Depending how TIFF has been installed on your machine, you may 
need to copy the header files, tif_dir.h and tiffiop.h, which you can on 
my FTP site, to your /usr/include directory (some systems seem to 
install these, and some do not - spandsp needs them installed to build). 
The spandsp library may be built by unpacking the tarball, cd'ing to the 
directory and using the time honoured incantation:

    ./configure
    make
    make install

or if you are using RedHat, Fedora, or something else that uses RPMs

    rpmbuild -tb spandsp-0.0.1.tar.gz

should build spandsp RPMs straight from the tar file. Then you just need 
to install them.

Add the files rxfax.c, txfax.c and dtmftotext.c (the last one has 
nothing to do with the fax machine, but my makefile patch expects it to 
be present) to the apps directory of your * source tree. Then use 
Makefile.patch to patch the makefile in the apps directory with:

    patch < Makefile.patch

Now if you rebuild and install * it should install these new apps.

OK, so how do you use them? Something like the following:

exten => 5678,1,rxfax(/home/steveu/testfax.tif)

will receive a fax if a fax machine dials 5678. The fax will be stored 
as the /home/steveu/testfax.tif. Similarly:

exten => 6789,1,txfax(/home/steveu/testfax.tif)

will send the fax file /home/steveu/testfax.tif, when a fax machine 
dials 6789.

Regards,
Steve