Page 62 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

The renewed relevance of the term communications terminal has nothing to do with
anything proprietary—rather, it’s the opposite. As we develop more creative ways of
communicating with each other, we gain access to many different devices that will allow
us to connect. Consider the following scenarios:

• If I use my PDA to connect to my voicemail and retrieve my voice messages (con-
verted to text), does my PDA become a phone?
• If I attach a video camera to my PC, connect to a company’s web site, and request
a live chat with a customer service rep, is my PC now a telephone?
• If I use the IP phone in my kitchen to surf for recipes, is that a phone call?

The point is simply this: we’ll probably always be “phoning” each other, but will we
always be using “telephones” to do so?

Linux Considerations

If you ask anyone at the Free Software Foundation, they will tell you that what we know
as Linux is in fact GNU/Linux. All etymological arguments aside, there is some valuable
truth to this statement. While the kernel of the operating system is indeed Linux, the
vast majority of the utilities installed on a Linux system and used regularly are in fact
GNU utilities. “Linux” is probably only 5 percent Linux, possibly 75 percent GNU,
and perhaps 20 percent everything else.
Why does this matter? Well, the flexibility of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. It is
a blessing because with Linux you can truly craft your very own operating system from
scratch. Since very few people ever do this, the curse is in large part due to the respon-
sibility you must bear in determining which of the GNU utilities to install, and how to
configure the system.
If this seems overwhelming, do not fear. In the next chapter, we will discuss the selec-
tion, installation, and configuration of the software environment for your Asterisk
system.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we’ve discussed all manner of issues that can contribute to the stability
and quality of an Asterisk installation. Before we scare you off, we should tell you that
many people have installed Asterisk on top of a graphical Linux workstation—running
a web server, a database, and who knows what else—with no problems whatsoev-
§
er. How much time and effort you should devote to following the best practices and

§ Just don’t ever install the X-windowing environment (which is anything that delivers a desktop, such as
GNOME, KDE, and such). You are almost guaranteed to have audio quality problems, as Asterisk and the
GUI will fight for control of the CPU.

34 | Chapter 2: Preparing a System for Asterisk