Any SIP/VOIP PBX in the packages any more?

[psychokiller]

Hi all,

a few months ago I experimented with Arch Linux for Arm and a Seagate Dockstar with both OpenSER/SIPS and Asterisk. Both were in the package repository at the time but I cannot find any of both now.

Is there any other SIP/VOIP/PBX server in the Arch Linux Arm packages? ALARM would be a great distro for the purpouse of building a PBX, but with no built/maintained packages in the repository the burden on a casual user would be a bit too much and he/she might turn to some other platform/distro.

FreeBSD for example has SD card images for a few ARM platforms and at least 4 voip servers in the ports repository available.

Does anyone have any idea why ALARM has no voip server anymore?

Paolo

[WarheadsSE]

Do FreeBSD ports repositories contain binary packages?

[psychokiller]

OK, WarheadsSE touched a point: FreeBSD ports does not contain binaries so the comparison might seem a bit unfair and should compare to AUR instead, but...

But FreeBSD ports are native to FreeBSD and are the only way to install packages in FreeBSD, AUR + Yaourt are not native nor as supported as ports are.

Installing (and automagically compiling) from ports is 99% of the time straightforward and mostly hassle free. Doing the same with AUR on arm usually requires at least editing the PKGBUILD file to modify the architecture: this is simple and effective most of the times, but many users might be fooled to think AUR packages are supported on x86/amd64 architectures only.

And to some extent they are, since once you modified the PKGBUILD you are out on a limb. Not to mention you actually need to install a manager such as Yaourt, otherwise AUR would pale in comparison to how easy is to compile+install with ports.

I don't want to be unfair to ALARM, since I understand finding a maintainer for a package is not an easy task and I am not in the position to offer my support to the community as it may be needed, just wanted to understand why no voip server software comes in binary form and if that is the signal of ALARM going toward a direction of supporting more desktop software then server software.

Sorry for the very long bragging.

Paolo

[WarheadsSE]

Asterisk/freeswitch/etc are not in the upstream Arch core/extra/community repositories, and that is why they are not in ours.

For a short period, they were in the ALARM 'aur' (not AUR) repository as pre-compiled. When the person maintaining them stopped doing so, we maintained them for a short time. Then they were removed from 'aur'.

[cmsigler]

At the risk of making too much noise, I want to say how impressed I am by Arch Linux ARM, including use of AUR for the non-standard ARM arches.

I've used yaourt since I started with Arch on i686/x86_64 with great success and ease. I was most pleasantly surprised to find that using AUR for the ARM platforms could be as easy as adding the proper identifier to the arch array variable in PKGBUILD.

Of course, not all source packages build on non-x86 architectures. But many have been ported to or written from scratch with non-x86 support. It's so easy to give a package a try, just edit PKGBUILD adding 'armv7h' or 'armv6h', etc., to "arch=" then run `makepkg'.

I hope you are successful! And apologies for the boosterism

Clemmitt

[psychokiller]

I have probably done too much ado about nothing.

I love ALARM and the AUR. And about the differences of ease of use compared to FreeBSD ports I was mumbling about tiny details.

I just wanted to ask just one serious question: is the lack of any voip server in the compiled binery packages a signal ALARM is drifting away from server side software and giving more attention to desktop software?

Just that.

Paolo

P.S. Thank you WarheadsSE for making it clear: Was my fault not to remember that what's upstream is what we get in ALARM as well, so are not just ALARM developers and maintainers to address with such a concern.

[psychokiller]

I see OpenSIPS is in community repository upstream in Arch Linux but not in ALARM: what would be the most effective way to help to have it in ALARM?

[WarheadsSE]

It looks like it was previously having build issues and is in the SKIP status.

Attempting to build it with `makepkg -A` from the i686 ABS is the most direct method of testing.

[WarheadsSE]

The opensips package is now in the repos for all architectures supported by ALARM. Feel free to test.