Greetings all,

How's this for the ultimate in geekware; my home Linux box answers my phone! I can download my messages over the Internet or Email them to someone. I can have my box send Email or a page to my cellular phone or work number. I can setup voice mailboxes (e.g. "press 3 to speak to Tang"). Lots of fun filled hacking awaits you and your imagination. Hook up an X-10 module and controller and you can have your lights blink for the hearing impaired (although I don't know how you'd listen to the message).

The nice part about the mgetty+sendfax+voice combination is that you can set up an order for your machine to answer your phone. Right now, I have mine setup for voice->fax->data, although I have the data part commented out right now - it allows your machine to setup a ppp connection, or just a "dumb interface" akin to the old BBS days so you can lookup or run stuff at home. You could probably transfer files with zmodem or such, but I'm not going to try it. You can run your machine as an old-fashioned BBS at anytime with a separate package just for that purpose though, which is a much better idea if you don't want to setup ppp service. Forget about FTP/WWW service though - but I think there's even a way around that with a package that encapsulates TCP/IP or something over "normal" phone line connections. Someday I'll look into it and update this. No, really...

(Note: All above content Copyright 2001 Micheal Holve Everything Linux except for the greetings all. taken from http://www.everythinglinux.org/multimedia/index.html)

This definitly sounds like an awesome setup, but I have no idea how to do it. My confusion starts in the second scentence, my home linux box answers my phone. I understand the idea and all, only thing is HOW?

Earlier he states that it is done using these modules:
mgetty, mgetty, mgetty+sendfax, mgetty+voice, kvoice, ksendfax, speaker(spk)

I get the mgetty thing. (well sort of I think I understand how it works) but then there comes the ones with the + sign I have no idea how to do this. I would really like to set this up, but I am a newbie and understand how to do nothing. I have reason to believe I might need to learn programming a bit better (I cannot program more then simple yes no programs) but I am unsure of wether or not this is true. If anyone could help me, you'd sure make me happy. (and maybe not feel like as much of a newbie as I am hehe) This would definitly make my day! (also I want to setup caller ID on it, if thats not a problem, I don't think it will be however, and I basically get the installation of that) If anyone can give me any help in this it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
definite newbie
Gilkyboy

I think ull like to look here

Aloha all,

I have visited this site both now, and also a copy of it before but am still baffled. I get that they have compiled this to work with mgetty+sendfax, but what about voice? they have a section on it but it says look in a config file. It doesn't say how to make it a +voice thingy at all. As you can probably tell, this all does belong in the newbie section. If anyone can help me out with this in any way, maybe even with the files and whatnot that I need, it would be greatly appreciated. And thanks for the help unSpawn.

Gilkyboy