Set up a replacement for skype telephone service

From Finninday
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action items

  • determine when our skype number expires: March 7, 2016
  • transfer number to a voip provider

Reading about options

A skype plugin for asterisk

  • asterisk docs

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Installing+AsteriskNOW

  • need to read this walkthrough for asterisk on raspberrypi

http://meshedinsights.com/2014/01/28/pibx/

  • another thing built by some asterisk developers

https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/FAQ#FAQ-Q:What?DidyousayitcantalktoGoogleTalk?

what softphone should I use?

  • exploring yate

http://yateclient.yate.ro/

  • ekiga picking this for now since it is the best looking in the fedora software store
  • linphone looks lame


raspberry pi asterisk

I really am motivated to move on this project now that Microsoft is getting more aggressive about retiring old Linux clients and breaking backward compatibility. Our old skype phones are acting lamer and lamer all the time with bad connections, voice mail failing to pick up, etc.

experiment with PBX in a flash vm

neat! there is a doc on how to run asterisk on your raspberry pi


  • using a raspberry pi model b and an old 8GB SD card
  • but ordered a raspberry pi model b+ and 64GB microSD to upgrade to after my first try
  • my first dd of the incrediblypi image wouldn't boot, so format and try again
  • I have a google voice number, but I'm not clear on whether it will work. We'll see.

copy image to sd card

  • make sure /dev/sdb is unmounted
  • dd if=imagefile of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
  • sync

When I get the dd command wrong and scramble the sd card, the raspberry pi won't light up any more than the single red led indicating power. When I get the dd command right and I get the pi to boot, then it looks like there are up to four leds going including the red power led.

[root@servo incredipi]# dd if=raspbian7-incrediblepi-07-28-2014.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
945+1 records in
945+1 records out
3965190144 bytes (4.0 GB) copied, 412.325 s, 9.6 MB/s
[root@servo incredipi]# sync

Bummer, the sd card image is mountable by my laptop and it looks valid. But the raspberry pi won't boot it. Made the partition bootable, but still no joy.