System information

Third-Party Repositories
For certain software dependencies, a third-party repository may be necessary. This
appears to be most often the case when using CentOS. A couple of repositories that
seem to be able to provide all the extra dependencies required are RPMforge (http://dag
.wieers.com/rpm/) and EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, http://fedoraproject
.org/wiki/EPEL).
We may occasionally refer to these third-party repositories when they are required to
obtain a dependency for a module we are trying to build and use.
Downloading What You Need
There are several methods of getting Asterisk: via the Subversion code repository, via
wget from the downloads site, or via a package-management system such as apt-get or
yum. We’re only going to cover the first two methods, since we’re interested in building
the latest version of Asterisk from source. Typically, package-management systems will
have versions that are older than those available from Subversion or the downloads
site, and we want to make sure we have the most recent fixes available to us, so we tend
to avoid them.
The official packages from Digium do tend to stay up to date. There are
currently packages for CentOS/RHEL available at http://www.asterisk
.org/downloads/yum.
Before we start getting the source files, let’s create a directory structure to house the
downloaded code. We’re going to create the directory structure within the home di-
rectory for the asteriskpbx user on the system. Once everything is built, it will be in-
stalled with the sudo command. We’ll then go back and change the permissions and
ownership of the installed files in order to build a secure system. To begin, issue the
following command:
$ mkdir -p ~/src/asterisk-complete/asterisk
Now that we’ve created a directory structure to hold everything, let’s get the source
code. Choose one of the following two methods to get your files:
1. Subversion
2. wget
46 | Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk