Frequently Asked Questions

Astlinux is designed to write to its storage as little as possible, in order to lengthen the lifespan of its hardware. When you first install Astlinux, the whole system is read-only. You need to configure persistent storage options.

Even if you set your timezone correctly on the Network tab, and the time appears to be correct elsewhere in the system, records listed on the CDR tab might have GMT timestamps. This is nothing to do with Astlinux, but is an Asterisk setting. Use the Edit tab to open cdr.conf, and look for the following line:

usegmtime=yes ; log date/time in GMT. Default is “no”

Change this value to “no” to have the system timezone used for the CDR.

The bottom line, as of the year 2016, there is absolutely no benefit for an AstLinux system to have more than 2 GB of RAM, more can exist but is unnecessary.

For 32-bit (non-PAE enabled) Linux, the maximum addressable user-space RAM is around 3 GB. This is the case for all AstLinux board types except x86_64 based images.

For 64-bit (x86_64) Linux, the maximum addressable RAM is only limited by your hardware, so you would expect to see about 4 GB with 4 GB RAM installed, but with the AstLinux system, the bootloader is RUNNIX (a 32-bit, non-PAE enabled Linux Kernel) which is common across all AstLinux board types. As it turns out with RUNNIX, the “BIOS-provided physical RAM map” is trimmed to 3 GB, and that trimmed RAM map is passed on to the 64-bit x86_64 AstLinux image (via kexec), thereby also limiting the x86_64 image to 3 GB of usable RAM.

The AstLinux developers have demonstrated that if the RUNNIX bootloader was compiled with a 32-bit, PAE enabled Linux Kernel, the “BIOS-provided physical RAM map” is not trimmed and the kexec'ed 64-bit x86_64 AstLinux image sees all the RAM. Unfortunately the net5501 and Alix hardware are not PAE capable.

The added confusion of multiple RUNNIX flavors would not actually solve a real-world problem, so the maximum recognized RAM currently remains at 3 GB. The day when greater then 3 GB RAM is useful, the RUNNIX bootloader can be compiled with a PAE enabled Linux Kernel.

Update -> RUNNIX 0.5 uses a PAE enabled Linux Kernel, so the full RAM is supported. Available in AstLinux 1.3.0 and later.

If you are running Astlinux 0.7.1 or later, Asterisk sounds packages are not installed by default. If a call tries to play a missing sound file, the call is silently terminated. To install the necessary sounds packages, see Sounds Packages.