You can now set up a Mac equipped with Terra Soft Solutions’ Yellow Dog Linux as the server for a PBX phone system, thanks to Digium, makers of the WildCard series of PBX interface cards.
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) is a common way for enterprises to provide telephony to their employees without having to run discrete phone lines to each employee — employees share a limited number of outside lines. Using Yellow Dog Linux, WildCard interface cards and Asterisk’s Open Source PBX software, you can now set up a PBX system on a Macintosh.
Digium president Mark Spencer explained that his company sees a future in consumer boxes with their PCI cards as well as embedded systems, so making sure Digium’s products work on PowerPC — a CPU platform present in both spaces — was “a natural evolution.”
The advantage over such a system compared with other PBX-based offerings is that the owner has total control — instead of leasing a system whose maintenance and upgrade is wholly dependent on a third-party contractor, you own it and don’t need a service contract to add or activate more lines or features. And what’s more, there may be performance benefits: Digium’s own tests showed a 400MHz G4 running YDL beat a 450MHz Pentium III-based system in 6 out of 9 processing and data handling tests, some by a factor of 2-to-1.
You can buy WildCards now through the Terra Soft Solutions e-store. And if you’re making a trip to this week’s LinuxWorld event in San Francisco, check out booth R17 — Digium is demonstrating a Power Mac G4 running Yellow Dog Linux.