Digium and N2Net have released AstWind — Asterisk for Windows. It’s a bit of a cheat using CoLinux to do all of the heavy lifting:
“The creation of AstWind was remarkably easy, thanks to the amazing work of the coLinux project which allowed us to setup a Debian GNU Linux environment on Windows with minimal overhead. The entire process took less than an hour. For obvious reasons, I do not advocate using AstWind for mission critical installations, but it does open some interesting doors for hobbyists and developers. With AstWind, users can experiment with the Asterisk PBX in a no-risk manner.” [via Voxilla]
AstWind only supports VOIP features, so you can’t use any of the PCI / USB hardware that is supported by Asterisk under Linux nor any TAPI devices supported by Windows, but… for a hobbyist / home user on a budget that may not be an obstacle. The Sipura SPA-3000 is about the cheapest way to support a single incoming POTS phone line plus a couple of regular phones, and as a networked SIP device it should work just fine with AstWind. Hard IP phones like the GrandStream BudgetTone 10x and Cisco 79xx should work too.
Update: After installing AstWind and playing around, I’m not sure that it really matters. The CoLinux and Windows environments are opaque to each other, so it’s more like running under VMWare than Cygwin. It doesn’t spare the user from having to muck around in Linux. I’d recommend that a home user that wants to play around go ahead and buy the cheapest PC they can find to run it under Linux. The requirements are fairly low, a Compaq or Dell SFF box from eBay in the $40-$60 price range will do nicely.
