Alec and Tom report that fonality, the makers of a custom Asterisk distribution, sold commercially and often bundled with the excellent “HUD“, are in the process of acquiring Trixbox, formerly Asterisk@Home. The fruit of Trixbox’s labor is a Linux ISO that includes basically everything you need to run Asterisk on a PC, and a number of cool extras, like FreePBX, a web-based administrative GUI for Asterisk.  The magic of Trixbox is that it shortcuts the often tedious process of configuring an Asterisk installation.  Check it out.