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Most Asterisk configurations are composed of three main packages : the main Asterisk program (asterisk), the Zapata telephony drivers (zaptel), and the PRI libraries (libpri). |
If you plan on a pure VoIP network, the only real requirement is the asterisk package, but we recommend installing all three packages; you can choose what modules to ac- tivate later. The zaptel drivers are required if you are using analog or digital hardware, or if you’re using the ztdummy driver (discussed later in this chapter) as a timing source. |
The libpri library is optional unless you’re using ISDN PRI interfaces, and you may save a small amount of RAM if you don’t load it, but we recommend that it be installed in conjunction with the zaptel package for completeness. In the first edition of this book, we recommended that you install the additional |
asterisk-sounds package. This was a separate compressed archive that you would download, extract, and then install. As of Asterisk version 1.4.0, there are now two sets of sounds packages: the Core Sound package and the Extra Sound package. Since As- terisk supports several different audio formats, these packages can be obtained in a number of different sound formats, such as G.729 and GSM. The reason for all of the different formats is that Asterisk can use the sound format that requires the least amount of CPU transcode. For example, if you have a lot of connections coming in on VoIP channels that are running GSM, you would want to have the GSM version of the sound files. You can select one or more sound prompt types in the menuselect screen (dis- cussed later in this chapter). We recommend that you install at least one type of sounds file from both the Core Sound package and Extra Sound package menu items. Since we may make use of some of the Extra Sound files throughout this book, we will assume you have at least one of the formats installed. |