[Asterisk-Users] SoftFAX/spandsp: installing and results on Gentoo

[Stephen Davies]

Hi,

I've installed spandsp library an RxFAX app on my Gentoo based *
server - here's a little report on the process.

Firstly - my Gentoo box had libtiff 3.6.0 installed, but did not have
/usr/include/tif_dir.h and tiffiop.h.

First thing I did was to copy the two missing headers from
ftp.opencall.org.

The result of that was seg faults when rxfax started trying to write
the tiff file.  I presume the headers on ftp.opencall.org don't match
the 3.6.0 release of libtiff.

The second thing I tried was to update my gentoo box to libtiff 3.6.1
- I emerged that, then also downloaded the source and from that
installed the extra headers.

That got rid of the seg fault, but the generated tiff files were now
almost completely black with just a couple of stripes instead of the
faxed image.

I then emerge unmerged tiff, and downloaded and built tiff-3.5.7 from
source manually.  Rebuilt spandsp and asterisk and bingo rxfax now
works.

My conclusion - spandsp seems to have a compatibility issue with
tiff-3.6.1.  (Unless my install approach was broken).  And - you may
want to make the two missing header files available for more than just
3.5.7 of libtiff.

I'm really impressed with the end-result - awesome to do that all in
software!

Regards,
Steve Davies