78 | Section 5
1 Get your ‘distro’
The most popular are at:
♦ www.digium.com
♦ pbxinaflash.net
♦ www.trixbox.org
♦ www.freepbx.org
Download your distribution. We’ll proceed assuming that you’re using PBX in a Flash, hence-
forth ‘PIAF’. It’s a few hundred megabytes. Once you have it saved on your hard drive, you’ll
need to burn it to a CD. It’ll have a file name that ends with .iso and you’ll have to use your CD
burning software to “burn an ISO image”. This procedure varies depending on what burning
software you have installed on your machine (Nero, etc), so if you haven’t done this, we sug-
gest ‘googling’ the search term “burn an iso image with” and add your burning software name
at the end. Many people have had difficulty with this process in the past and you’ll find clear
instructions there. It’s important that you burn the ‘image’ and not just copy files. The CD that
you create will boot up by itself and will wipe out anything on the installed hard drive. Before
booting, check the bios in your machine to be sure that CD-ROMs are bootable. If the machine
is recent, no action should be necessary.
2 Get loaded: Install Asterisk
Put your freshly-burned PBX-In-A-Flash disc into the CD-ROM drive and start the machine. You
may need to press the space bar when the machine asks if you would like to boot from the
CD-ROM. If you have trouble, check the boot menu in your BIOS. Sometimes you have to set
a BIOS menu option to allow CD-ROM booting. Most newer boards allow CD booting because
Windows and Linux are distributed on CD-ROM. Have an Ethernet cable plugged into your new
machine, as the system will attempt to download the latest updates at the end of the installa-
tion. You should have the machine connected to a router that has a DHCP server so that the
machine can configure itself with the parameters that your router gives. If you are using two
or more Ethernet cards, the new system will only attempt to use one of them for the automatic
updates, usually the onboard one or the card with the lowest MAC address. It may ask you to
choose one. It’s no big deal If you guess wrong because you can change it later (and get the
updates) or configure it all manually.
The procedure will start by copying all of the files needed for the basic operating system into a
RAM disk that is used for the install. You’ll be asked a few questions along the way:
From the text menu, select an install type. Take the default by pressing the ENTER key. This
selects the ‘Default’ installation. It will remind you that the machine will be wiped completely.
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