gundy dot org

The new version of Asterisk (1.4) is getting a GUI. I’ve known that for a while. I didn’t know, however, that Digium has wrapped the whole thing up as a Distro based on what looks like Fedora Core or RHEL.

From the announcement:

Asterisk® can now be easily configured with a graphical interface. The new site, AsteriskNOW.org, which is still in development, hosts AsteriskNOW™ Beta. AsteriskNOW™ Beta is a Software Appliance; a GUI implementation with the open source Asterisk distribution. AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy. You no longer have to worry about kernel versions and package dependencies. Unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance are included.

I’m usually very suspicious of GUIs used to configure servers, but if Digium is behind it, I’ll at least give it a look. A “distro” based install of Asterisk sounds like a great trouble-free approach when installing for someone that doesn’t have full-time sysadmins.

I’m still going to be using CentOS or RHEL for my personal stuff and wondering about the real question… When will the Zaptel drivers make it into the kernel?

Update: Looks like the distro is rPath Linux.