Newbie questions on Asterisk@home

[ant101]

Hi guys,

We're toying with the idea of replacing our museum piece of PABX (standard telkom DISA system, most probably a champ back in the day) at work with Asterisk@home's great features. We only have 2 normal incoming lines (+ seperate fax line and 3G ) at the momonet. We're not really interest in the VOIP option, but are particulal looking to adding 4 internal phone extensions, perhaps USB phones for internal chit-chat, not for dialing out.
Some questions which come to mind...
1. Is it better to install Asterisk@home straight from the CD iso, OS and all, or can a person install SUSE 9.3 and then Asterisk@home with little hassle ?
2. During powerfailures, (which seem the norm for 2006!) will the phone system be completely down without a UPS for the computer? (Will user intervention be required to plug a normal phone back in the Telkom line to regain incoming calls?)
3. I'm thinking of purchasing Digium card's- would this be the simplest option?

Thanks!
:)

[nic777]

1. Asterisk@home is a complete distro which will format your entire hard-drive to install CentOS and Asterisk. So no, you can't use Asterisk@home and Suse.

You could try to to install and configure Asterisk yourself ON suse although it doesn't sound like much fun.

[Gambit]

I managed to install asterisk and AMP on a kubuntu linux box. It was a mission but I did get it working perfectly. So I would say that you should only go for a manual installation if you got free time.

[renm]

on A@H CD, there is a asteriskathome.tar.gz file, you can use it to install A@H on most of linux distro, of cause some of them need manual adjustment

[ant101]

Cool thanks! I will stick with the standard distro.

Do the Digium TDMxxxx cards, say with 2 FXO and 2 FXS, work correctly on a newish P4 system? (about a year old celeron 1.6GHZ) I just read on Digium site that there are compatability issues with new P4 systems? But some tutorials seem to report that P4 1GHZ systems are fine :confused:
By "compatability" perhaps they are referring to the PCI slot being 3.3volt instead of 5volt?