pk stuff

After digging up my password, no mean feat itself, I downloaded and installed MC 6.4 for RHEL 4.4 – binary RPMs all the way. You must install on a system that Pika supports, right down to the kernel version. As far as I can tell, even the kernel objects are prebuilt. Compared to Sangoma or Digium, this is a real pain in the neck. Not sure how Pika plans to address this in the future but I suspect users familiar with Open Source will not see sufficient added value and choose a more “open” platform.

Anyway, the install made it most of the way then quit. Hunting around the disk, I found pikainline.ko but no corresponding /dev/pikainline0 node. Got nowhere trying mknod with some old device numbers gleaned from old MC docs. Pika tech support set me straight with 242 as the major number. All is now well.