Installing the FXO and Asterisk

At this point, I turned off the monitor and moved to my Windows workstation to continue building my answering machine. The most popular SSH client for Windows that I'm aware of is PuTTY , and that's what I used to remotely access the Debian machine. After downloading the executable, simply double click it, enter your Asterisk PC IP address, and hit open. You should then be prompted with a Security Alert asking you to accept a key. Choose Yes and enter "root" (without the quotes) when the "login as:" prompt appears. Once logged in, you'll have full control as if you were sitting at the actual PC. You can start multiple SSH sessions into your Asterisk PC which will probably come in handy as you go.

Now we need to get and install the drivers (aka kernel modules) for the X100P card by issuing the following commands:

aptitude install module-assistant
aptitude install kernel-headers-`uname -r`
m-a prepare
apt-get build-dep zaptel-source
m-a a-i zaptel
depmod -a
modprobe zaptel
modprobe wcfxo

If everything worked properly up to this point, you should be able to type:

lsmod | grep zaptel

and see something similar to:

zaptel 182020 1 wcfxo

Which indicates that the X100P drivers are installed. The final step is to install Asterisk itself, which is done by entering:

aptitude install asterisk asterisk-config asterisk-sounds-main