Would there be an Asterisk box available? What I mean is that it is available as hardware with the same functionallity as the *nix version(s) with some kind of GUI to connect to?
The asterisk appliance is available from Digium
http://www.digium.com/en/products/appliance/
Also you can get a box prebuilt with FreePBX from the FreePBX team (they also have packages with phones as well)
http://www.freepbx.org/freepbx-selection-guide
[quote=“swaterhouse”]The asterisk appliance is available from Digium
http://www.digium.com/en/products/appliance/
– cut – [/quote]
Thanks. Allthough the dollar is falling (according to EUR), I think it is still a big investment for someone like me 
You can probably get a system running cheaper by using a cheap desktop and downloading AsteriskNOW (the open source version of the appliance).
Also, you will probably not find a cheaper solution out there with anywhere near the same functionality as Asterisk.
depending on how many phones you plan to run with it, its very easy to get asterisk up and running manually on fedora… I have a very happily running asterisk at home running on a celeron 2 ghz, ive tested and pushed 20 simultaneous calls thriugh this without issue… it was very simple to get up and running…
the hardware can be had very cheap(less than $250 US forthe whole box)
I downloaded and installed fedora core 6 (Free)
during the install I de-selected all options for X windows or any graphical software… I installed all development tools and legacy development tools. this gets me the proper GCC compilers installed…
I edited the inittab and set it to start at runlevel 3
did a yum update on the GCC and lib-devel packages
a great place to start is here :
astrecipes.net/index.php?from=28 … 1.4%20beta
that link has all kinds of goodies if you want to make your own cheap and easy asterisk box… the free asterisk Gui uses 1.4 so make sure you do this instead of 1.2 or the 1.6 beta (not sure if the gui supports 1.6 yet)
-Christopher
thanks for you replies; I think I will use a PC then rather than the Digium hardware (costwise dicision).
thanks again,
well remmeber this doesnt replace any digium PSTN cards you may need… such as FXO to connect pots lines to or FXS if you want analog phone sets… if you are going ALL IP with SIP phones and SIP/IAX trunking then all you need hardware wise is the PC, your phones and the layer 2 switch… if you are going to combine desktop workstations on the same network as phones you will want managed switches and VLANs with priority…
-Christopher