[asterisk-users] Summary of "Trixbox vs. custom install"

[Tom Rymes]

On Feb 15, 2007, at 7:01 PM, Stefano Corsi wrote:

> Hello everybody. First of all thanks to all the people giving their  
> opinion on the subject I proposed: "Trixbox vs. custom install".  
> You've all been very helpful.

[snip]

> I also include a consideration from mine: I would happily use  
> Trixbox, because I did FreePBX setup once and it was a real pain,  
> but I'm very frightened by a few issues:
>
> 1) Trixbox "Macho" installation that installs everything without  
> asking. I, for example, would like to use software RAID (maybe it's  
> wrong with Asterisk, but I want to do it!). I wouldn't like doing  
> it manually after Trixbox installation. I would like to have an  
> installer doing it for me. Centos (ex redhat) installer does it, so  
> why Trixbox choose to install everything without prompting?

Stefano,

Great summary. As an aside here, it is possible to install Trixbox on  
top of an existing CentOS installation by using the tarball, not the  
ISO. This works very well, with one issue I ran into. A fresh install  
of CentOS updated via yum will not have the correct version of the  
kernel to match the zaptel-modules RPM shipped with Trixbox (because  
it is no longer in the repositories). You can fix this problem two ways:

1.) Manually install the kernel from the Trixbox CD, which will fix  
the problem, if you prefer to work just the way Trixbox normally  
does. You should configure yum to not upgrade the kernel in this  
case, because that would break zaptel.
2.) You can download and manually recompile zaptel on your own.  
Either you will have to recompile zaptel every time that the kernel  
is upgraded by yum, or you should configure yum to not upgrade the  
kernel. (This is true of any zaptel install, not just Trixbox.)

See the bug i posted: http://www.trixbox.org/modules/xproject/ 
index.php?op=viewTicketMain&id=27

Another resolution would be to provide an SRPM for the zaptel-modules  
package, which you (or the tarball install script) could rpmbuild -- 
rebuild against your current kernel.

Either way, this isn't a big problem so long as you know it's there.  
Worst case scenario, you just download and compile zaptel, which you  
would have had to do anyway for a non-trixbox install.

Tom