Hi Guys,
After ASL is installed on SD Card, and allstar node working ,i dont want to see the b/w Screen all the time …Can i add Ubuntu or similar on the
SD Card without corrupting my files for my Allstar node ???
“Adding” ubuntu May add compassion and human values to your setup but your statement demonstrates a lack of understanding the underlying pieces. Please allow me to explain. Asterisk is a program that works as a platform to switch and route media (think audio, video, text messages). It’s basicly a phone switch like a mini central office or pbx. The asterisk program can run applications such as app_rpt which we use to give us repeater and remote base caibilities. All this still needs an operating system to run which provides services to the running programs such as connection to screen, keyboard, and internet. The operating system needed is some version of Linux. You could run asterisk/app_rpt under just about any Linux flavor. What asl has done is to do all the hard compiling and building for you to provide a simple, installable image to start with. ASL is a Linux distribution specifically made for running asterisk/app_rpt and includes it by default. It’s also the route where you will have the most and best support. Now another point to be made. The GUI you see on some Linux flavors/distributions is really just a super fancy pretty looking shell around the core that takes away processor cycles from running your main program (asterisk/app_rpt). The GUI generally takes the form of X11 and a window manager of your choosing. Burdening a system that doesn’t need it with X11 and a window manager simply to make it look perdy is an invitation to disaster. An old friend of mine once told me, “software and code, not present and not running has no bugs, opens no additional security holes, and uses no cpu cycles…“. I think that’s pretty wise advise. Could you add a GUI or even a simple console screensaver to your asl install? Yes you could. Could you run asterisk/apt_rpt on a fully bloated ubuntu install or some other flavor of Linux? Sure, but given the above and someone else already did the hard work for you with asl why would you want to bother? Think of the hardware that provides The asl functionality as an appliance and let it do its one job well. Don’t add unnecessary stuff lest you invite trouble into your house. Learn to use the command line, it’s quicker and more efficient anyway but like any new skill will take some time and practice to master.
Eric
Af6ep
Sent using SMTP.
···
On May 31, 2020, at 5:10 AM, Colin Jones via AllStarLink Discussion Groups noreply@community.allstarlink.org wrote:
| oz123colin
May 31 |
- | - |
Hi Guys,
After ASL is installed on SD Card, and allstar node working ,i dont want to see the b/w Screen all the time …Can i add Ubuntu or similar on the
SD Card without corrupting my files for my Allstar node ???
Visit Topic or reply to this email to respond.
You are receiving this because you enabled mailing list mode.
To unsubscribe from these emails, click here.
You can disregard all the dire warnings (above) and safely run Asterisk/Allstar on a Linux machine that has a GUI. I’ve done this on many systems (Pi & x64 hardware) and it works just fine. I do this on a Pi with the gui so I can run a browser which has a customized Allmon system as a touchscreen controller to my radio-less node.
The best approach is not to add the GUI to an existing install, but instead to do a Linux install and add Allstar to it. There are instructions on the Allstar Wiki for doing just this. I’ve done this on Debian 9/10 and Raspbian (Pi and x64 versions). Raspbian is based on Debian, so much the same, but a “lighter” install.
You can backup all your current config files, install a new OS, setup the basics, then move your config files back. If you had a good understanding of using SSH for file transfer and knew Linux a bit, this is a trivial issue. If you’re new to all this, it will take a little learning, but still, not a hard endeavor.
1 Like