http://www.asterisk.org/    Asterisk™ 1.0 Today, at the first annual Astricon Conference, Asterisk version 1.0 was announced by Mark Spencer and released to the world. For information on how to download Asterisk, click here. This release marks the outstanding achievements of the developers, the hundreds of friends and tireless supporters from IRC on irc.freenode.net in #asterisk, and the thousands of Asterisk users worldwide. Also made available today are the 1.0 releases of Zaptel, the software drivers for Digium hardware, and libPRI, the GPL-licensed PRI stack supporting North American and EuroISDN PRI protocols. Digium wishes to thank everyone that has contributed their time, energy, money, and passion to this software. We look forward to the continued efforts of this wonderful community, as it extends Asterisk to the undefined limits of imagination. (September 23rd, 2004). What Is Asterisk? Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the Features section for a more complete list. Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk's sponsors, Digium™. Digium has single and quad span T1 and E1 interfaces for interconnection to PRI lines and channel banks as well as a single port FXO card and a one to four-port modular FXS and FXO card. Also supported are the Internet Line Jack and Internet Phone Jack products from Quicknet. Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces. Asterisk supports US and European standard signalling types used in standard business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastructure. Asterisk not only supports traditional phone equipment, it enhances them with additional capabilities. Using the Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX™) Voice over IP protocol, Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seamlessly across disparate networks. While using Packet Voice, it is possible to send data such as URL information and images in-line with voice traffic, allowing advanced integration of information. Asterisk provides a central switching core, with four APIs for modular loading of telephony applications, hardware interfaces, file format handling, and codecs. It allows for transparent switching between all supported interfaces, allowing it to tie together a diverse mixture of telephony systems into a single switching network. Asterisk is primarily developed on GNU/Linux for x/86. It is known to compile and run on GNU/Linux for PPC along with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X Jaguar. Other platforms and standards-based UNIX-like operating systems should be reasonably easy to port for anyone with the time and requisite skill to do so. Asterisk is available in the testing and unstable Debian archives, maintained thanks to Mark Purcell. Who Made This? Asterisk was originally written by Mark Spencer of Digium, Inc. Code has been contributed from open source coders around the world, and testing and bug-patches from the community have provided invaluable aid to the development of this software. Where is Asterisk going? Asterisk is growing fast with new features added frequently to the CVS tree. Mark Spencer and numerous contributors from around the world contribute new code and patches on a daily basis. To stay up-to-date on the growing feature list of Asterisk, please visit Digium's website for more information on subscribing to the Asterisk mailing lists http://www.asterisk.org/index.php?menu=download Download Asterisk™ You can download a tarball of the released sources at ftp://ftp.asterisk.org/pub/asterisk. You can download the tarball files directly here: Asterisk Zaptel Libpri Asterisk-addons You'll need Asterisk™, and if you're using Digium's™ hardware you'll need zaptel. For T1 or E1 interfaces you'll also need libpri. You will need bison in order to build Asterisk™. The ncurses and ncurses-devel packages are required if you wish to build the new tools (e.g. astman). Installation should be in this order: zaptel, libpri, Asterisk The fastest way to obtain Asterisk™ is to use CVSup. To check out Asterisk™ using CVSup, create a sup file as follows: *default host=cvs.digium.com *default base=/usr/src *default release=cvs tag=. *default delete use-rel-suffix asterisk libpri zaptel Perhaps call it "asterisk-sup" and put it in /usr/src Then simply: # cd /usr/src # cvsup asterisk-sup Or, you can obtain Asterisk™ by checking out a fresh copy from our CVS Server. To check out code from our CVS repository: # cd /usr/src# export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.digium.com:/usr/cvsroot# cvs login - the password is anoncvs. # cvs checkout zaptel libpri asterisk To get the current stable release, issue the following command: # cvs checkout -r v1-0 zaptel libpri asterisk asterisk-addons asterisk-sounds After you recieve the latest code from CVSup or CVS, issue the following commands as root to install Asterisk™ on your system: # cd zaptel# make clean; make install# cd ../libpri# make clean; make install# cd ../asterisk# make clean; make install Things you will want to install Asterisk and/or Zaptel: ncurses, and associated -devel openssl, and associated -devel zlib, and associated -devel bison, and associated -devel Linux 2.4 kernel sources Other items of interest in the Asterisk CVS repository are: astcc - The Asterisk Calling Card Application asterisk-addons - An addons package, which includes MySQL support for call detail records asterisk-sounds - Additional sounds for Asterisk btp - The Bluetooth Presence Daemon gastman - The Graphical Asterisk call manager iaxyprov - The IAXy provisioning utility