Page 76 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Compiling Asterisk

Once you’ve compiled and installed the zaptel and libpri packages (if you need them),
you can move on to Asterisk. This section walks you through a standard installation
and introduces some of the alternative make arguments that you may find useful.

Standard Installation

Asterisk is compiled with gcc through the use of the GNU make program. To get started
compiling Asterisk, simply run the following commands (replace version with your
version of Asterisk):
# cd /usr/src/asterisk-version

# make clean
# ./configure
# make menuselect
# make install
# make samples
Be aware that compile times will vary between systems. On a current-generation pro-
cessor, you shouldn’t need to wait more than five minutes. At AstriCon (http://
www.astricon.net), someone reported successfully compiling Asterisk on a 133 MHz
Pentium, but it took approximately five hours. You do the math.
Run the make samples command to install the default configuration files. Installing these
files (instead of configuring each file manually) will allow you to get your Asterisk
system up and running much faster. Many of the default values are fine for Asterisk.
Files that require editing will be explained in future chapters.

If you already have configuration files installed in /etc/asterisk/ when you
run the make samples command, .old will be appended to the end of each
of your current configuration files, for example, extensions.conf will be
renamed extensions.conf.old. Be careful, though, because if you run make
samples more than once you will overwrite your original configuration
files!
The sample configuration files can also be found in the configs/ subdir-
ectory within your Asterisk sources directory.

If you’re using a system that makes use of the /etc/rc.d/init.d/ or /etc/init.d/ directories,
you may wish to run the make config command as well. This will install the startup
scripts and configure the system (through the use of the chkconfig command) to execute
Asterisk automatically at startup:
# make config

48 | Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk