Running Asterisk on Linksys NSLU

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1 Running Asterisk on Linksys NSLU
2 Problem
3 Solution
4 Discussion
5 See Also:
6 Metadata

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Running Asterisk on Linksys NSLU

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Problem

Setting up a home or SOHO asterisk server, running on Linksys NSLU.

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Solution

The idea is to run asterisk 24/7 on a reliable platform (no hard drive, no fans) and with little power consumption The Linksys NSLU seems to be a perfect candidate. It comes with one Ethernet interface and two USB 2.0 ports.

First of all, we need to re flash the original firmware. There are several alternatives, but the easiest one for beginners is Unslung. Unslung is based on the official Linksys firmware with several improvements. New features are added via the optware packages.

The entire flashing and unsling procedure is described on the http://www.nslu2-linux.org website. Once the device is unslinged, asterisk can be installed via the following simple commands:

ipkg update ipkg upgrade ipkg install asterisk

Note: There are several platforms supported apart from Linksys NSLU (see http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Platforms?from=Unslung.OptwarePlatforms).

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Discussion

What is specific to the optware distribution?

all the files are installed under /opt directory. The config files are installed under /opt/etc/asterisk/samples directory. It is necessary to copy all the config files that you need into the /opt/etc/asterisk/ directory and modify them to suit your needs.
the ARM CPU doesn't have a built in FPU (floating point unit) and therefore codec translation cannot be used for specific codecs that require a large number of floating point operations. Examples of these codecs include iLBC and Speex. Asterisk features that require some form of transcoding to function (conferencing, text to speech, etc) may also have issues.

The following asterisk packages are available from the optware feeds:

- asterisk version 1.2
  - asterisk
  - asterisk-sounds
  - asterisk-chan-capi
- asterisk version 1.4
  - asterisk14
  - asterisk14-core-sounds-en-ulaw
  - asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-gsm
  - asterisk14-extra-sounds-en-ulaw
  - asterisk14-gui

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