Page 65 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

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 the previous chapter, we discussed preparing a system to install Asterisk. Now it’s
time to get our hands dirty!
*
Although a large number of Linux distributions and PC architectures are excellent
candidates for Asterisk, we have chosen to focus on a single distribution in order to
maintain brevity and clarity throughout the book. The instructions that follow have
been made as generic as possible, but you will notice a leaning toward CentOS directory
structure and system utilities. We have chosen to focus on CentOS (arguably, the most
popular distro for Asterisk) because its command set, directory structure, and so forth
are likely to be familiar to a larger percentage of readers (we have found that many
Linux administrators are familiar with CentOS, even if they don’t prefer it). This doesn’t
mean that CentOS is the only choice, or even the best one for you. A question that often
appears on the mailing lists is: “Which distribution of Linux is the best to use with
Asterisk?” The multitude of answers generally boils down to “the one you like the
best.” †

* And some non-Linux operating systems as well, such as Solaris, *BSD, and OS X. You should note that while
people have managed to successfully run Asterisk on these alternative systems, Asterisk was, and continues
to be, actively developed for Linux.
† We will be using CentOS Server 4.4 in this book, which we usually install with nothing except the Editors
package selected. If you are not sure what distribution to choose, CentOS is an excellent choice. CentOS can
be obtained from http://www.centos.org.

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