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bencurtis · Nov 18, 2007, 11:55 AM

Has anyone ever successfully used Asterisk on Mac OS X? Or other similar PBX applications?

I realise there are builds that you can download that supposedly work on Mac, but they appear to require some massive command-line skills.

Asterisk MacOSX Support - voip-info.org

I just look at the offerings for Linux such as TrixBox, FreePBX, AsteriskNOW, etc etc all with pretty mature GUI interfaces and generally seemingly user-friendly... and wonder why has no-one created such a thing for OS X do you think? Or have they and I'm mistaken?

I have this Mac-mini (PPC) sitting here as a server that would be just perfect as a PBX...

Regards,

Ben

mduell · Nov 18, 2007, 12:43 PM

Put it this way... even the guys I know who use Mac/OS X for everything have a Linux box for Asterisk. I'd just grab Yellow Dog or one of the other PPC Linux distros.

bencurtis · Nov 18, 2007, 02:33 PM

I'm sure you are right... just seems a shame to have to dedicate the box to Linux, and that OS X doesn't have an equivalent especially considering OS X's *nix roots. Shame Apple hasn't thought of implementing Asterisk into OS X Server, would be a great addition and Apple is the sort of company who could do it really well.

mduell · Nov 18, 2007, 04:06 PM

You could run Linux inside VirtualPC... not sure if that would be fast enough for the low-latency voice codecs used.

bencurtis · Nov 18, 2007, 04:49 PM

Haven't tried it on VirtualPC, but suspect it wouldn't work so well. I could see it working OK in a virtual environment on an Intel machine, being near-native speed, but for me VPC on PPC MacMini is so slow anyway... Guess i am better off buying an old PC laptop running TrixBox, like your friends... but frankly I don't really need a PBX, just interested to play around with one.
At the moment I'm using the asterisk-based free virtual pbx at www.pbxes.org (and before that I used the somewhat similar Voxalot - Home) and it's OK, but it'd be nice to be able to tweak things a bit more.

Maybe in a couple years this thread will be re-activated with discussion of the new Apple iPBX application in OS X Server with full iChat integration :-)

Ben