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I replaced my home landline with an Asterisk box running on a Supermicro Atom D510 mboard, specifically PBX in a flash, which is the Cliffs' notes version of FreePBX. FreePBX is based on Asterisk, but provides a spiffy web interface for configuration that's more advanced and free-er than the others. That said, you'll still need to be comfortable at the command line on Linux and a text editor such as vi.

With Asterisk, you can do voicemail, have your voicemail emailed to you, have multiple boxes, pay $1.50 per month for a phone number plus $.01/minute for calls with a SIP provider such as Vitelity. You can have conference calls (you'll need to pay $10/channel for g729 if you want to scale at all on home bandwidth, though.)
You can have ring groups, different extensions, etc. I have one for emergency late-night network issues, which only those with the secret extension can access to wake me up.

There's an unlimited number of stupid tricks you can do, but you'll need to learn the difference between trunks, routes, and dial plans. That said, it's pretty cool. But then you'll want to buy Aastra SIP phones, which come with open-source phone applications, so it will cost you more. If you want to light up your in-house phone lines, it's $200 for an FXS card. If you want to use an existing landline as a trunk, it's $200 for an FXO card. (Double check which is which before you buy because I can never remember which is which.)

The best part about running your own PBX is that (1) you can send telemarketers to voicemail hell and (2) it's trivial to fake callerID, which helps with (1).

Originally I set up Asterisk from source code and did everything the hard way, but about a year ago I switched to FreePBX which has simplified my life considerably. I have a few hand-coded scripts (for the SMS stuff) but otherwise it's all managed through the web interface now.

Interfacing with my clients' phone systems was a matter of getting configuration info from the phone systems' managers, then editing the XML file that tells my phone where to connect to.

Definitely none of it is a smooth and easy as getting Skype up and running. But in the long run, the extra effort has paid for itself countless times over.

I have set up asterisk at home and love it. In fact, I wrote a voicemail app for it and put it out there for free - http://www.littlejohnconsulting.com/ari/ My install has voicemail space till you fill up the harddrive, call attendant, and unlimited routing/call forwarding options for the lines I have. My favorite is what I have heard called the ex-girlfriend option, where you route calls that you know you do not want to never-neverland. Your don't have to know they called.

I have it running on an old 600Mhz machine, have a digium card, and used http://freepbx.org/. If I had it to do over again, I would not have any phone line hardware (drop the digium card) and do everything voip buying the service from a voip vendor.

I found it to be a lot of fun and to meet my needs it did not take to much effort. Lots of help is out there now.

This clever software should have been reviewed by senior management before it ever saw the light of day. The episode gives all of us a golden opportunity to stop and think about what we're doing and what our fundamental obligations are to those who use our code. Hopefully, Fonality will turn this BOT off... permanently! The problem, of course, is that it's hard to unring a bell. This BOT is already in the wild. Luckily there's a very quick solution in this case. Here's the command that should be added to tomorrow morning's Fonality script: rm -f /var/adm/bin/registry.pl. We'll all sleep better.

In the above thread it is mentioned that FreePBX phone's home as well. Instead of splitting hairs over definitions, let me make it perfectly clear what FreePBX does. Most of you are aware of our Online Module Repository that provides easy updates to new versions of FreePBX and its modules (vs. pulling tarballs manually).

Why not just use freePBX? It's the web frontend/configuration that Trixbox uses. It can be installed on basically any distro (I run it on debian), so you can pick the one you're most comfortable with. Having it installed separately also means you can upgrade components separately.

I'm the lead deveoper for freePBX, which is the GUI for Asterisk that Trixbox uses, and I was a bit surprised by this announcement. The CEO of Fonality has clarified things a bit in a comment to my original post when I first heard about this. The linked blog entry is pretty much incorrect, from what I can see. I've also posted on the trixbox forums and Chris also explained a bit more there about what's going on.

However, FreePBX _is still free_ - It hasn't been bought, it's still pure Open Source, and it's not forking to a non-free addition, so don't panic. Trixbox is just a wrapper for asterisk and freepbx (and, obviously, a couple of other things), and Fonality have bought the wrapper, not the package.

I'll leave to to your previously scheduled conspiracy theories now.

--Rob

I'm the lead deveoper for freePBX, which is the GUI for Asterisk that Trixbox uses, and I was a bit surprised by this announcement. The CEO of Fonality has clarified things a bit in a comment to my original post when I first heard about this. The linked blog entry is pretty much incorrect, from what I can see. I've also posted on the trixbox forums and Chris also explained a bit more there about what's going on.

However, FreePBX _is still free_ - It hasn't been bought, it's still pure Open Source, and it's not forking to a non-free addition, so don't panic. Trixbox is just a wrapper for asterisk and freepbx (and, obviously, a couple of other things), and Fonality have bought the wrapper, not the package.

I'll leave to to your previously scheduled conspiracy theories now.

--Rob

I've just released FreePBX 2.1.2, which is a major security upgrade from 2.1.1. Not really relevant to this article, except that they both deal with Asterisk.

(For those that don't know, FreePBX is the only open source GUI for configuration and management of Asterisk. www.freepbx.org)