Package comm/asterisk (unstable) no longer contains chan_modem_i4l.so

[Jim Hickstein]

I've been trying for months to get Asterisk going with an ISDN BRI in 
the United States, i.e. with National ISDN-1 (NI-1) rather than DSS1. 
It's very frustrating.

My latest attempt uses Debian 2.6.17 (unstable) with the HiSax driver (I 
have a passive card, the Eicon Diva PCI 2.02) and the 'asterisk' 
package.  My Debian stable system's HiSax drivers are apparently too old 
to deal with this card (the docs mention the 2.01 as the latest), and 
the unstable 'asterisk' package is apparently too new to still have 
chan_modem_i4l.so.  mISDN doesn't support any of the passive cards, so 
Asterisk really should not yet drop support for chan_modem_i4l.

Must I abandon the Debian packages for all this, build a 2.6 kernel with 
HiSax yet build Asterisk from source in order to get the ISDN4Linux 
functionality that is still claimed at 
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/asterisk ?  Is there no way to 
do this with the Debian package system?

--

My earlier attempt used unstable, the Debian 'asterisk' package, and an 
Eicon Diva Server 4BRI-8M card (v1.0) with drivers obtained from Eicon, 
and built against the /usr/src/linux tree, plus 'asterisk-chan-capi'. 
This actually works, but crashes (the card, not Linux) after a few 
minutes.  Eicon promised to send me a debug build, but while I wait I'm 
trying the Diva PCI 2.02 passive card again.

I have Googled and read FAQs seemingly forever, and am still no closer 
to a solution.

Thanks for your help.