[asterisk-users] Rolled Distro?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 06:18:47PM -0500, Jason Lixfeld wrote:
> 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.

Or use the following patch, based on the idea of the patch written by
Faidon Liambotis for the Debian package:
http://bugs.digium.com/13822

> 
> 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.

Debian? (backports from Unstable, as soon as Lenny is released).

However, is that really what you want to do? When Asterisk upgrades,
things change. The package in Debian Stable (and also e.g. the one in
SUSE, if they actually maintain it) is designed to keep getting critical
updates, but nothing more. The current package in Etch is 1.2.13 . The
one in Lenny will be 1.4.21 .

So far I don't see any of the other distributions focus on such support
for a "just working" Asterisk.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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