[thelist] Computerized Automatic Phone Answering

[Fred Jones]

> IIRC FXO is what you need to connect to
> the phone company and FXS if you're connecting to analog phones.

Seems here http://www.pbxeq.com/fxs_vs_fxo.php to indicate the
opposite. Here http://www.3cx.com/PBX/FXS-FXO.html it seems to
indicate something altogether different--don't know what they saying
there really.

Anyhow I have a few options here http://tinyurl.com/mlnrf6 which is a
retailer in my country. There is a single FXS or FXO there. Which one
do I need?

For the PC itself, I think any simple modern machine will be more than
sufficient.

I told the boss the estimate is 8-20 hours of work and he accepted that. :)

Regarding doing a virtual machine, I now think against that because
that would entail hardware virtualization and require a driver AFAIK
for the card on both the host and the guest OS and if the host is
Windows, I presume that thare are drivers somewhere for Windows (here
might be a place http://www.asteriskwin32.com/ ) but it seems that
without question the main OS for this type of work is Linux and trying
to use Windows may be just asking for (extra) headaches.

If I use Debian Stable, then I expect they will be OK--it *is* a
pretty stable distro. :)

Thanks.