Exciting announcement! I’ll have to consider how to proceed with my upgrade, it’s going to be from the OS up on a VPS (to get Debian 12), then backup, rebuild and restore the configuration of over 40 Docker containers!
Going to take a LOT of planning.
I’ll check out the docs in the meantime. While I’ll try and get round to watching the video, I hope that’s not mandatory for anything more than an overview and “what it looks like” of the installation, as I struggle to follow detailed instructional videos, but do like videos for that overview. The PDF manual, OTOH will be invaluable.
And is there anywhere I can find out what bells and whistles from the Pi version are missing in the others? My main site is a VPS and definitely not conducive to migration to a Pi.
The only real difference is going to be that the Pi version is pre-built with Allmon3, Cockpit & the pretty landing page. Everything the Pi version has can be added to the x64 version via apt packages. (Tim can correct me if I’m wrong…)
Setting up the package repo for Debian 12 and then doing apt install asl3 asl3-menu asl3-update-nodelist will give you everything on the Pi appliance except the “appliance” features like Cockpit, landing pages, Allmon3, etc.
The video is actually good. But it’s for the Pi. Not much for intel except maybe the menu part. It’s still worth watching.
The ASL3 Manual has good instructions for setting up ASL3 on Intel. It super simple for Linux types familiar with apt. ASL3 Intel is a basic no frills AllStar. Allmon3 is available from the same repo.
ASL3 does have a menu. For experts setting up ASL3 the first time, I’d recommend using the asl-menu to set up a couple of nodes and look at the config files. This will give you a feel for the template structure later Asterisk versions provide. After you get the hang of templets it’s much easier to edit configs, particularly for servers with more than one node.
ASL3 changes the guts of AllStar. For example, Asterisk runs as non-root which creates some gotchas. The ASL3 Manual documents those and more. Veterans and new AllStar users alike really need to rtfm if you’re doing a non Pi install.
My suggestion would be to reach out to the Raspberry Pi folks and suggest that they add VoiceOver support to their app. It’s possible that they don’t know there’s a need.
I’ll certainly write to them. Thing is, I really don’t know why VoiceOver isn’t seeing any controls after the first page, so I can’t tell why it doesn’t work. Hopefully they can figure that out.
No luck on a T95 H6 device running bookworm (Debian 12). Some folks call this the “inovato”. Which is a similar box.
Everything managed to install fine. However Dahdi and USB audio devices (CM108) are not working. Going to look more into it and see what the issue is. Not sure if kernel headers are still required and whatever else.
The ASL3 Manual has good instructions for setting up ASL3 on Intel. It super simple for Linux types familiar with apt. ASL3 Intel is a basic no frills AllStar. Allmon3 is available from the same repo
I’ll definitely have a read of the manual, looks like a necessity. .
ASL3 does have a menu. For experts setting up ASL3 the first time, I’d recommend using the asl-menu to set up a couple of nodes and look at the config files. This will give you a feel for the template structure later Asterisk versions provide. After you get the hang of templets it’s much easier to edit configs, particularly for servers with more than one node.
This will be useful for me, as my main server hosts several nodes. Templates would be a good fit for me.
ASL3 changes the guts of AllStar. For example, Asterisk runs as non-root which creates some gotchas. The ASL3 Manual documents those and more. Veterans and new AllStar users alike really need to rtfm if you’re doing a non Pi install.
Yeah big changes. However for me, despite the complexity of AllStar3 migration, I have a major system to migrate. The host doesn’t run Debian 12, so everything down to the base VM need to be changed, and there’s not only AllStar, but mrefd (M17 reflector), Caddy (as a reverse proxy), Docker and 41 containers to migrate.
Speaking of containers, can AllStar 3 run in a container yet? (even if only for setups without radio hardware lime mine), or is that still not possible? Being able to run ASL3 in a container would greatly simplify migration for me.
It was rather a surprise to see two bug reports closed yesterday without action. I went to the issues and found the repositories archived but a link to the new repositories and the new manual. I see that a lot of work has taken place to bring AllStar back into sync with Asterisk. Very cool! Congratulations to the team.
After following the instructions and setting a custom user and hostname, I am looking around the file system on the micro-SD card (I won’t boot this image on the test repeater today as there is a net tonight and won’t have time to get everything setup) and see that /etc/hostname is still set to allstarlink3 instead of the host name I assigned and the user account I set does not appear in /etc/passwd. Finally, no home directory was created for my user, only the /home/pi directory exists.
I’m rather well versed with Debian. I also have a FreedomBox that has Cockpit available that I know tends to hide things from the usual places. I’d appreciate a pointer to where the custom settings are stored just to verify them prior to the first boot.
Assuming that you used the Raspberry Pi Imager, it sounds like you entered your custom settings but at the “Would you like to apply OS customisation settings?” prompt you didn’t click on “YES”. I would try re-flashing the SD card.
Oh, wait, if you are just looking at the SD before booting then the first boot/run components have likely not been exec’d … and that’s where the customization likely happens.
Looks great. But I’m trying to edit ini and config files in terminal and I cannot figure out how to save my edits. control X shows a list but no save that I know how to do.
thank you for any help.
I had a 32 year career in IT. This ASL3 re-write is beyond amazing. To do this much work, with so few bugs, and having amazing documentation to go along with it; deserves appreciation and respect. Hopefully everyone will donate to support this wonderful product/service.
Chip Eckardt
W9OQI
This looks like some sort of Arm-based mini-PC. As long as it’s using the standard Debian 12 kernel, OSS and Dahdi should “just work” but I know nothing about this device. Installing ‘asl3’ after configuring the repo should cause everything you need to install including the kernel headers. I would suggest opening an issue at Issues · AllStarLink/dahdi-linux · GitHub so you can provide some debugging information in a better forum for it.
It’s theoretically possible to run it in Docker and Podman. It requires some setup for the /dev entries and exposing the kernel models needed to the docker. What we really need is a container wizard to help with the project - would make some of these kinds of features go much faster.
Ahhh, thanks for the tip. Yes, I now see that the values are placed in the firstrun.sh script on the boot partition and the initial cmdline.txt gets it all going. I’m the sort that likes to know the “behind the scenes” stuff and I know that Raspberry Pi OS does initialization such as resizing the root partition, Here I have an opportunity to check things before a first run.
With this little screenshot is looks like you’re trying to use nano commands inside of vim? I’m not sure how you go to where you did, but saving a file in vim is :wq. Make sure you’re editing through the interface in asl-menu and choose the editor you’re most comfortable with.
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