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“Callware VoiceOne” from Voiceone is an easy to use web based GUI for the Asterisk PBX. It gives full control over settings through a simple admin panel. You can manage extensions, preferences, POTS/ISDN/VoIP trunks, queues, and rules sets and dynamically create IVRs.

Voiceone has taken this one step further by releasing a live CDROM called “VoiceBuntu“. With VoiceBuntu any user can test and try VoiceOne without having to install it. The great thing about VoiceBuntu is that it is an integrated package of Asterisk, MySQL, Apache, VoiceOne, php and many others. As an end user, this is great. There is no fiddling needed to make the components work.

VoiceBuntu also has a persistent mode which requires the use of a thumb drive to store your VoiceBuntu data.

Having read article from PendriveLinux.com and through some trials and errors, I have found that it is possible also to boot VoiceBuntu from the thumb drive. This means that you can do away with the CDROM and now have a portable IP PBX on a thumb drive.

What You Need To Get Started

• Internet Connection
• USB portable flash drive of at least 2GB. Be careful. Any data in this drive will be overwritten. So, if you want your data, make sure you back it up or use a new drive.
• VoiceBuntu Live CDROM. You can download and create one from here.

The subsequent steps assume that your computer is running Ubuntu and you already know how to run Linux commands from Terminal.

Step 1 - Format USB drive

• Run “Terminal” application.
• Type “sudo su” and enter administrator password to have full access privileges.
• Stick the USB portable drive into the computer.
• Type “fdisk -l” to list all the drives and partitions in the computer. The USB drive should be listed under as “/dev/sdx“ where x is the letter assigned by the computer to the drive.
• Unmount all partitions under “/dev/sdx”. Type “umount /dev/sdxn” where n is a number representing a partition. As example, “umount /dev/sdb1″.
• Type “fdisk /dev/sdx”.
  • Type “p”. This shows a listing of all existing partitions on the drive.
  • Type “d” to delete the partitions.
  • Type “p” again to check that all partitions are deleted.
  • Type “n” followed by “p” to make a new partition.
  • Type “1″ to create partition 1.
  • Press “Enter” key to use the default cylinder.
  • Enter “+750M” to set this partition to 750MB. This is equal to the size of CDROM.
  • Type “a” followed by “1″ to make the partition active.
  • Type “t” followed by “6″ to set the filesystem for this partition to FAT16.
  • Type “n” followed by “p” to make a second partition.
  • Type “2″ to create partition 2.
  • Press “Enter” key to use the default cylinder.
  • Press “Enter” key again if you want to use the rest of the drive for this partition. If not enter size as in earlier step.
  • Type “w” to write table to disk and exit.
• Again unmount all partitions under “/dev/sdx”.
• Format partition 1. Type “mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n voicebuntu /dev/sdx1″.
• Format partition 2. Type “mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdx2″.

Step 2 - Install syslinux

• If the computer does not already have syslinux, then type “apt-get install syslinux mtools”. Enter “y” when prompted to install the application. The computer needs to be connected to the internet for the application to be downloaded.

• Type “syslinux -sf /dev/sdx1″.

Step 3 - Copy all data from CDROM to USB drive

• Remove and re-insert the USB drive to mount back the USB drive.
• Type “cd /cdrom” to access the cdrom directory.
• Type “cp -rf casper disctree dists install pics pool preseed .disk isolinux/* md5sum.txt README.diskdefines ubuntu.ico casper/vmlinuz casper/initrd.gz /media/voicebuntu” to copy from the cdrom to partition 1 of USB drive. You can ignore the “cannot create symbolic link” messages.

Step 3 - Copy isolinux.txt and syslinux.cfg to USB drive

These two files can be downloaded from http://pendrivelinux.com/downloads/u7fixit.tar. This is a large file and one of the file inside is not needed. So, my advice is just to follow the steps below.

• Type “cd ~” back to home directory.
• Type “mkdir u7″ to reate directory u7.
• Type “cd u7″ to change directory to u7.
• Download isolinux.txt and syslinux.cfg
• Type “cp isolinux.txt syslinux.cfg /media/voicebuntu”

The USB drive is now READY FOR USE!

Step 4 - Boot From USB drive

• Unmount the USB drive as in previous steps.
• Remove the USB drive.
• Connect USB drive to a computer that has BIOS that supports boot up from “USB-ZIP” drive.
• When booting up the computer, configure the computer to boot up from “USB-ZIP” drive. Usually pressing “F2″ key should bring up BIOS configuration.
• Let the computer boot up from the USB drive. Choose “USB” mode (default) for VoiceBuntu. After sometime, VoiceBuntu should be ready.

Findings

• Booting up from USB drive is a little slow. Patience can help. Once VoiceBuntu is running, the speed of access for the drive is good.
• There is no problem with data saving and retrieving. The only exception is changing of “root” password. The new password applies only to the session. After reboot, the new password does not work.
• When I do a system reboot, the USB-ZIP drive is not detected. I have to remove and reconnect the USB drive for the computer to detect it again. This problem may be specific only to this computer. Other models of computers may not suffer from this problem.
• See tips below about booting into command line mode. After Voicebuntu has been set to command line mode, there appears to be no way to reset Voicebuntu back to kiosk mode on boot up.

Tips

• It is possible to boot VoiceBuntu into command line mode. When VoiceBuntu splash screen appears, press “F6″ to edit the start up line. Add in mypwd=passwd and noX, where passwd is any string that you like. When the system boots up, enter the password as “do_enterconfpasswd“. Replace passwd with the string that you entered.
• Once logon, it is possible to go to the kiosk mode by typing “startx”. To get back to command like type “CTRL-ALT-Backspace”.
• At command prompt, you can change the IP address via ifconfig command or if you prefer to have a permanent fix, you can modify “syslinux.cfg” under /media/voicebuntu. This is an example with changes for password, command line mode and IP address:

LABEL USB
	menu label ^Start VoiceBuntu in persistent mode kernel vmlinuz append file=preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash mypwd=123 noX static=192.168.2.98 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.2.1

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 2:37 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.