System information

Getting the Latest Version
Asterisk is a constantly evolving project, and there are many different versions of the
software that you can implement.
In Chapter 2, we talked about Asterisk versioning. The concept of how Asterisk is
versioned is important to understand because the versioning system for Asterisk has
undergone a few changes of methodology over the years. So, if you’re not up to speed
on Asterisk versioning, we strongly recommend that you go back and read “Asterisk
Versioning” on page 26.
Having said all that, in most cases all you need to do is grab the latest version from the
http://www.asterisk.org/downloads website. We will be installing and using Asterisk 1.8
throughout this book.
Getting the Source via Subversion
Subversion is a version control system that is used by developers to track changes to
code over a period of time. Each time the code is modified, it must first be checked out
of the repository; then it must be checked back in, at which point the changes are
logged. Thus, if a change creates a regression, the developers can go back to that change
and remove it if necessary. This is a powerful and robust system for development work.
It also happens to be useful for Asterisk administrators seeking to retrieve the software.
To download the source code to the latest version of Asterisk 1.8, use these commands:
$ cd ~/src/asterisk-complete/asterisk
$ svn co http://svn.asterisk.org/svn/asterisk/branches/1.8
You can now skip directly to “How to Install It” on page 48.
The preceding commands will retrieve the latest changes to the source
in that particular branch, which are changes that have been made after
the latest release. If you would prefer to use a released version, please
refer to the next section.
Getting the Source via wget
To obtain the latest released versions of DAHDI, LibPRI, and Asterisk using the wget
application, issue the following commands:
$ cd ~/src/asterisk-complete/asterisk
$ wget \
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-1.8-current.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf asterisk-1.8-current.tar.gz
The next step is to compile and install the software, so onward to the next section.
Downloading What You Need | 47