[Asterisk-Users] Just getting started...

[Rick Green]

Last night, I attended a presentation on asterix by Greg Boehnlein, and I
caught the bug.  Today, I've spent the day reading, downloading, and
trying to get started.  Watch out for the first step, its a doozey!

I have no hardware(FXO, FXS ports, VoIP phones) as yet, so I'm trying to
move forward with just the commodity stuff I have on hand.

Here's my current plan:

1) Install and learn an IAX 'softphone' application.  I have some minimal
experience with ohphone, which I hope will translate to an IAX softphone.

2) Contract with an ITSP for a DN and PSTN interconnect.

3) Install and configure asterix as a simple(?) voicemail intermediary
between the ITSP and the gnophone 'extension'.

4) Purchase IAXy and/or other FXS ports and expand to multiple extensions
around the house.

Sounds like a plan?

Starting with step one, Google led me to gnophone, and I've downloaded and
installed it, but gotten no further.  It comes with absolutely no
documentation, manpage, README, etc.  It hasn't seen a release in three
years.  The download site has .rpms for the application, as well as
several required libraries, but makes no mention of what distribution
these are expected to fit.  These installed without errors on my SuSE 8.1
system.  I ran ldconfig.  I attempted to start gnophone - it complained
that it couldn't find libplds4.so.  Locate told me I had it, in several
aplication directories.  I added /opt/mozilla/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf,
re-ran ldconfig, and re-attempted gnophone.  It issued a string of
messages:

Registering Enlightened Sound version 0
Loaded and activated '/usr/lib/gnophone/modules/audio-esd.so'
New input space:  0 of 40 64 byte fragments (0 bytes left)
New output space:  40 of 40 64 byte fragments (2560 bytes left)
Registering Unknown Audio device on /dev/dsp0
Loaded and activated '/usr/lib/gnophone/modules/audio-oss.so'
Loaded and activated '/usr/lib/gnophone/modules/audio-phone.so'
Registering Mozilla/5.0
Loaded and activated '/usr/lib/gnophone/modules/html-mozilla.so'
iax.c line 654 in iax_init: Started on port 5036
Listening on port 5036
Initialized phone core
New input space:  0 of 40 64 byte fragments (0 bytes left)
New output space:  40 of 40 64 byte fragments (2560 bytes left)
No bytes to read
Error reading voice data on Unknown Audio device on /dev/dsp0
Segmentation fault

So here I'm stuck.  There were no documentation files in the .rpm, nor on
the website.  The README consists only of "We released it, Hooray!".  Is
this worth pursuing?  Is there another IAX softphone application out
there?  Greg mentioned in his talk a 'firefly IAX stack' but a google
search tells me that is a windows app.  Not an option.
  If this managed to start and run, how do I use it?  The website
mentioned a Mozilla interface.  Will gnophone start a mozilla instance,
capture an already running instance, or do I have to start it and point it
at localhost:5036 or some other port?

So many questions...
-- 
Rick Green

'The more I learn, the more I learn... how much more there is to learn!"
                                                        - Charlie Brown