NOTE: This page is outdated. Please use the new location of ant-phone's homepage at http://www.nongnu.org/ant-phone/
ANT is a desktop ISDN telephony application written for GNU/Linux. It supports OSS (Open Sound System) and I4L (ISDN4Linux). Its user interface was made for GTK+ 2.x (GIMP toolkit).
It directly interfaces OSS and ISDN devices, so there is no need to install extra software or hardware like PBX (Private Branch Exchange) or telephony cards, if you've got direct access to an audio capable ISDN card (teles or HiSax chipset, e.g. AVM Fritz Card) and a full duplex soundcard or two sound devices.
NOTE: Currently, this is a work in progress (beta version) and may contain bugs. But for me, it runs quite stable now. So don't hesitate after looking at the rather small version number and try it out. Any comments, suggestions and bug reports are welcome.
Have a first look at ANT with this screen shot:
The following list isn't very exhaustive yet. :-) Please supply me with the vendor and product name of your ISDN card, if you successfully tested ANT with your card not mentioned in the following list. Basically, every card based on the Siemens chipset supported by the Linux HiSax driver should be supported by ANT. Please give me the name of your driver if use a different one.
Supported Cards:
This software is delivered in different forms:
Please note that the operating system distribution specific packages (Debian, SuSE etc.) are sometimes a bit out of date. Besides, I don't personally support the OS distribution specific packages (except Debian). Please contact the respective maintainers when problems arise.
After downloading the source tarball, just unpack it, build (compile) and install the executable and run it:tar xfvz ant-phone-X.X.X.tar.gz cd ant-phone-X.X.X ./configure make make install ant-phone
(Further documentation is included in the tarball.)
This program is free software and is covered by the GPL (GNU General Public License, Version 2), but could also be licensed in other ways by sponsors. Please contact me for that.
A: After reading this FAQ, please write me an email containing:
$ ant-phone --debug
A: Try with the development files (headers), instead of only with the binary package. The headers are usually contained in <packagename>*-dev (for Debian) or <packagename>*-devel (for SuSE) or something like that. Note that you need libsndfile version 1.0 or above.
A: Please make sure that:
A: I'm sorry that I noticed that too late. I have planned to release "my" ANT back in the end of 2000 and didn't check the whole web for namesakes. My compromise is to use the name ANT always in conjunction with "ANT is Not a Telephone" or as "ant-phone". As long as there are more people happy with my little project than complaints, I won't change the name. Besides, even in the FRG, there are many computer/IT related companies with the same name. We seem to have to arrange with each other. And fortunately, "Another Neat Tool" plays in a completely different category (league? ;).
A: This is a kernel-internal problem. While reading blocks from a kernel OSS audio device (and ISDN), select(2) consumes much kernel cpu time. But that seems normal/ok for now. The problem doesn't seem to appear with ALSA.
A: Make sure not to run a sound daemon (like aRTs).
Besides sponsoring :) there are some other ways to contribute to this project. Here, I've got some points from the TODO list which I definitely can't do myself in the near future for different reasons. If you like to take one, please write me an email. Thanks!
Any suggestions, comments and bug reports (which are highly appreciated) go to the ant-phone mailing list ant-phone-devel@nongnu.org. For discussion and announcements, you can subscribe to the list. You can also browse the Mailing List Archives. If this fails or for non-public discussion, contact the maintainer directly: Roland Stigge <stigge@antcom.de>.