Asterisk vs. AsteriskNow

Hi;

I’m trying to nail down which one is best between Asterisk, AsteriskNow, Tribox, Astlinux, and all the other flavors. I can see the appeal AsteriskNow, in the sense, of th GUI. But, being a linux lover, I also like the idea of the CLI. First of all, this is just for my home, and eventually a office/home with very few users. So, eventually, I will install it on a Soekris or a HP slim client. But, for now, I want to pull up my sleeves and get my hands dirty, which leaves out Astlinux, so, I’m thinking either Asterisk or AsteriskNow. (sorry for the run-on). Any opinions.
Besides the GUI in AsteriskNow, is there any other differences? Does it have bugs? Recommendations?

Asterisk now is a live CD whereas you can install asterisk and then the GUI…

Ian

Ok, yes, I know that, but, I’m asking what are the main differences between the two. Any pros/cons? Opinions? etc…

I personally dont like the CPU usage that asterisknow seemed to take… so I run a straight distro of fedora core 6, asterisk 1.4.xx, 1 zaptel card, and then loaded the asterisk Gui (same one that *now uses) and then turned off many unneeded services and run it at runlevel 3 and it uses very little CPU / memory… I run it beautifully on a 2 Ghz Celeron, 80 Gig HDD, and 512 MB ram - nice little 1u server…
and wasnt hard at all t oget going…
-Christopher

Cadillackid; but, wouldn’t that be the same as installing the AsteriskNow, then removing or stopping services? Please understand, I’m not trying to be rude here.
If I understand correctly, these two different versions are the same exact thing, except that AsteriskNow has the GUI installed with it. And, if you installed Asterisk, then installed the GUI after, wouldn’t that be the same thing? Then taking off the services that were not, are not needed.

Yes that would be the same excpet for the distro which may or may not be a factor for you.

Trixbox is different because it uses Asterisk on CentOS, FreePBX as the GUI and a whole crapload of other “features” all on the same box. I personally dont recommend trixbox. If you dont need the extra features but like the FreePBX GUI just instal Asterisk on CentOS and install FreePBX seperately.

Most of the others are some flavor of Linus with a version of Asterisk and either a home grown GUI or a customized version of FreePBX (or it’s predecesor AMP).

As a newbie to asterisk and having only just setup a pbx with asteriskNow I’d recommend using asteriskNow. Reason being there will be plenty of things to keep you occupied without having to worry about the distribution, kernal, supporting packages etc.

I’ve got mine working with a sip provider and a FXS card.

I choose to use the GUI for some tasks and also as a great learning tool when I’m doing something new to get me started such as when I put the card in.

For the more complex tasks like setting up time based call routing I choose to use the console. First thing I did with conary was to get midnight commander installed :smile:

HTH