Telephony

Today Nerd Vittles shares some of our favorite tips and tricks for tricking out your TrixBox.

Today we introduce a complete Podcast Studio for Asterisk … your telephone. You can record podcasts and play them back using a plain old telephone and the new Nerd Vittles Gabcast Player for Asterisk.

Today we put our money where our mouth was an introduce a plug-and-play Asterisk system for Windows. Download the preconfigured (free) TrixBox system, install (free) softphones, sign up with two Internet telephony service providers (Total Cost: $12.50 for 3 months), and you’re done. In less than 30 minutes, you’ll be taking calls without knowing anything about Linux or Asterisk. Here’s how …

Today, we take AsteriDex to a new level. The original web-based autodialer for your Asterisk PBX has been well received. AsteriDex lets you automatically connect any phone to your friends and business associates with one keystroke using a tab-based web application and a MySQL database. Then we added a speed dialer, and AsteriDex placed the calls using entries in your AsteriDex database. And now AsteriDex has been customized for TrixBox. It’s all free for the downloading…

It’s free software day again at Nerd Vittles, and today we have yet another trick for your TrixBox: an RSS news reader for your Asterisk telephones. Just dial an extension and listen to a one minute news headline summary in more than a dozen categories any time you like. And it’s free, of course. Here’s how to install it …

Here’s the definitive step-by-step guide to quickly installing the Asterisk@Home replacement, TrixBox 1.1. It includes the CentOS 4.3 version of Linux and Asterisk 1.2.9.1. In addition, you’ll get an Apache web server, SendMail and Asterisk voicemail servers, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, SugarCRM, NVfaxdetect, Samba for Microsoft file sharing/networking, and much more. The whole project will take you about 90 minutes to complete, and it’s free of charge. This edition of the Newbie’s Guide also adds tips and tricks for those updating from a previous version of Asterisk@Home or TrixBox 1.0.

Whether it’s a quick weather update or a seven-day forecast, you’ll now be able to listen to it from any touchtone phone by dialing 611 and then a three-digit airport code for any of 1,000 cities you’re interested in. All you’ll need is a free Asterisk@Home or TrixBox server, the free Flite speech synthesis engine, our free MySQL database of airport codes and cities in the United States, and, of course, version 2 of our free Asterisk text-to-speech weather application. Here’s how …