System information

CHAPTER 3

Installing Asterisk

I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my

chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they

were great and noble. The world is moved along, not

only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the

aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

—Helen Keller

In this chapter we’re going to walk through the installation of Asterisk from the source

code. Many people shy away from this method, claiming that it is too difficult and time-

consuming. Our goal here is to demonstrate that installing Asterisk from source is not

actually that difficult to do. More importantly, we want to provide you with the best

Asterisk platform on which to learn.

In this book we will be helping you build a functioning Asterisk system from scratch.

In this chapter you will build a base platform for your Asterisk system. Given that we

are installing from source, there is potentially a lot of variation in how you can do this.

The process we discuss here is one that we’ve used for many years, and following it will

provide you with a suitable foundation for Asterisk.

As part of this process we will also explain installation of some of the software de-

pendencies on the Linux platform that will be needed for topics covered later in this

book (such as database integration). We will show instructions for installing Asterisk

on both CentOS (a Red Hat–based distribution) and Ubuntu (a Debian-based distri-

bution), which we believe covers the vast majority of Linux distributions being installed

today. We’ll try to keep the instructions general enough that they should be useful on

any distribution of your choice.

* If you are using another distribution, we’re willing to bet you are quite comfortable with Linux and should

have no trouble installing Asterisk.