[asterisk-users] Rolled Distro?

[Jason Lixfeld]

Hi folks,

I've been a trixbox user for a few years now but I'm thinking about  
jumping ship.

Trixbox is great, but it's missing two features out of the box which  
are really important to me:  outbound faxing (hylafax) and imap  
voicemail.  I see no indication that they will be included anytime in  
the near future, so I have a choice to make - I've looked around at  
Elastix, Druise OSE and AsteriskNOW hoping to try to find a viable  
alternative, even considered trying to install both features in Trix.   
Here are my concerns:

Take away the fact that installing hylafax on Trix is trivial (have it  
running on 2.2), two things concern me when it comes installing IMAP  
voicemail.  First off, they have forked FreePBX, so even if it works  
today because the hooks are in FreePBX, it may not work tomorrow.   
Second, I doubt the Trix Asterisk binaries have IMAP support compiled  
in.  If not, sure I could do the sources manually but that makes  
upgrading asterisk in the future a laboring process.

Elastix...  I suppose the problems are the same as with Trixbox,  
except they haven't forked FreePBX so this may be a better way to go.

Druid has IMAP built in and because hylafax doesn't necessarily need  
any GUI hooks, I could conceivably go this route fairly easily.

The recent beta of *NOW uses FreePBX and CentOS which finally makes it  
a contender for me.  Same problem as Trix and Elastix though - if the  
binaries aren't compiled for IMAP support, what happens if I compile  
from source and want to upgrade in the future?

I guess I'm looking for advice.  Based on everything I know today,  
Druid seems like the best choice, but maybe I'm missing something.  Is  
there another option?  Some other distribution?  I'm not the Sysadmin  
type so I don't want to have to labor over manual upgrades once a  
month or so - and that's the big argument against rolling my own * box  
and doing everything from source.  I'd rather be able to click  
'upgrade', have it go do it's thing and trust that it's going to work.

Thanks in advance.