What is Asterisk/Trixbox

First, Asterisk is an opensoure PBX (phone system). I’ve deployed several systems with great success. I generally use the digium hardware, which is the company that originally developed and later opensourced the Asterisk system. They have tremendous community support, of which, voip-info.org is my favorite.

So, what is Trixbox? I’ve been using Trixbox since it was Asterisk@home. It is basically a prepackaged install of Centos with Asterisk on a single CD. You pop in the cd, reboot the machine and let it do the rest. It formats, installs and configures your packages. After that, you need only to login and get started. They have a commercial version now as well as an appliance, but I like the tried and true CE version. This is packaged with a great GUI and most common packages. You can add an extension with phone mail in about a minute or two!