Hi, I'm new to Asterisk and AstLinux, and not a Linux guru by any stretch of the imagination. My goal was to run an Asterisk system on a small system. Because of its small footprint, AstLinux looked like the perfect software platform to run as an appliance. To that end, I've tried a number of things, all resulting in failure. Not having an old PC available, I put together a very small, but adequate system according to the requirements of AstLinux. It is an Intel Atom D510MO having 2 sata ports and a few USB ports. I intended to use a compact flash card as the system disk. Here is what I've done:
Following the documentation, I downloaded geni586/astlinux-0.7.2-asterisk14.img.gz, gunzipped it and copied the image to a compact flash card using physdiskwrite under windows XP-64. That resulted in a "Boot Error" from the bios. After some digging around, a posting on the Asterisk forums confirmed that physdiskwrite doesn't work. I tried to copy the image under Centos 5.5 using dd if=astlinux-0.7.2-asterisk14.img of=/dev/sdd. Same result. Another attempt under Debian also gave a boot error. After more searching, I found a posting on Astlinux-users that reported problems with sata drives (Can't Access TTY; Job Control Turned Off). It turns out that if a sata drive is present, but no media (you ejected the CF disk), this error does not occur. OK, I can't use sata ports. This will have to be a USB based system. Then I tried to put the image on a USB stick using Centos and Debian. It is worth noting that I tried a 4 different USB sticks, all booted other operating systems (Debian, Centos, Tiny Core Linux, and DOS) quite nicely on the D510 board, on an Intel BX975XBX2, and on an Intel DX38BT motherboard. All pretty common platforms. Regardless, none of the machines would boot the USB sticks with astlinux-0.7.2-asterisk14.img. Before you ask if I know how to use the "dd" command, I had several saved Tiny Core Linux images that I was able to copy to the same media and boot (both USB sticks and CF disks). I don't think my copy of astlinux-0.7.2-asterisk14.img.gz was corrupt, as I downloaded it a couple of times from http://www.astlinux.org/release/072. At some point, I had also tried astlinux-0.6.7-geni586.img.gz from Source Forge. Time to be a bit more creative. I put astlinux-0.7.2-asterisk14.iso on one of the same USB sticks that did not boot the AstLinux image. It did boot. I tried to use astinstall but that failed. More web searching turned up a posting where it was mentioned that astinstall has been broken for quite some time. I don't recall the forum. Thinking an older version might work, I had to go back to 0.4.3 before I could get it installed. However, that is so old, it didn't recognize the newer ACPI hardware. Obviously, some people do have 0.7.2 up and running. Maybe AstLinux is only suitable for use on older hardware with IDE drives. This represents my evenings after work for the past week and a half, and I'm about to give up on AstLinux. Am I completely in the dark or is the operating environment for AstLinux too limited for my needs? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks, don ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [email protected].
