I wonder if Asterix is a bit overkill for what I am trying to do:
I just want to check that there isn’t something simpler before I start. My OS is linux, commandline, root access. And my VoIP provider provides my local rate phone number in addition to my sip: address
If you just want a VOIP phone why don’t you set up your SIP account on a soft phone on your computer directly. There are a lot of soft phones out there for Linux.
i do use linux sip softphones.
It would be nice to know of one that has an answerphone. It would be even better to know of a text mode phone that will i can run on my server that doesnt have x.
Further still, the software would need to take messages yet still allow me to make outgoing calls from my laptop.
There might already be something that does this, i just cant find it
I do not know of any text based soft phones. I know that Zoiper has a linux phone but I did not see an auto answer option on it. In Asterisk you can set a sip header that will tell phone to auto answer. I have never tested it with a Zoiper phone but it should work (lots of soft phones do).