I don’t know how I missed this, but I just came across an excellent Asterisk How-to guide on howtoforge.com, the excellent site that houses an increasing amount of guides of doing many things on Linux. The article is entitled “Installing the Asterisk PBX and The Asterisk Web-Based Provisioning GUI on Linux” and it provides a good step-by-step guide on getting started with Asterisk PBX on your favorite Linux distribution.

The guide is neatly organized into chronological sessions that you can follow step by step if you want to implement your own Asterisk PBX or if you would just like to try it out.

The guide assumes a Linux Red Hat ES4 distribution though if you know your way well enough around Linux, you can easily adopt it to suit your own Linux distribution of choice.

The first part of the guide is about installing and configuring the core Asterisk package, and the guide provides clear and concise instructions you can follow. The steps looks easy enough that most Linux users familiar with fiddling with their system can easily follow it. Just in case something doesn’t work though, you’re kind of left with your own “googling” skills. At the end of the 7-step part of the installation howto, you will have a working Asterisk installation on Linux. The guide provides basic test instructions that you can use to verify if your installation of Asterisk was succesful.

Next, the how-to discusses the necessary steps needed for you to install and configure the Asterisk manager: the component of Asterisk that lets you manage your Asterisk PBX. The guide also discusses AJAM, a new feature found in Asterisk 1.4 that allows a web browser or any http-enabled application to access the Asterisk Management Interface

The second page (and the last part) of the guide is about installing the Asterisk Web-Based Provisioning GUI. Although Asterisk can be used through the command line without this component, installing the Web-based GUI will simplify and make things a lot easier if you’re maintaining an Asterisk deployment. Again, the guide provides an extensive and yet easy to follow set of instructions to guide any user trying to install the web-based Asterisk GUI.

Overall, the guide is a good starting point if you want to get your hands dirty with Asterisk PBX.

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