Page 78 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

make config
The make config if
/etc/rc.d/init.d or /etc/init.d directories are found to exist. If they do exist, the scripts
are installed with file permissions equal to 755. If the script detects
that /etc/rc.d/init.d/ exists, the chkconfig --add asterisk command will also be run to
cause Asterisk to be started automatically at boot time. This is not the case, however,
with distributions that only use the /etc/init.d/ directory. Running make config will not
do anything to an already running Asterisk process, or start one if it’s not running.
This script currently is really only useful on a Red Hat-based system, although initial-
ization scripts are available for other distributions (such as Gentoo, Mandrake, and
Slackware) in the ./contrib./init.d/ directory of your Asterisk source directory.

Using Precompiled Binaries

While the documented process of installing Asterisk expects you to compile the source
code yourself, there are Linux distributions (such as Debian) that include precompiled
Asterisk binaries. Failing that, you may be able to install Asterisk with the package
managers that those distributions of Linux provide (such as apt-get for Debian and
#
portage for Gentoo). However, you may also find that many of these prebuilt binaries
are quite out of date and do not follow the same furious development cycle as Asterisk.
Finally, there do exist basic, precompiled Asterisk binaries that can be downloaded and
installed in whatever Linux distribution you have chosen. However, the use of pre-
compiled binaries doesn’t really save much time, and we have found that compiling
Asterisk with each install is not a very cumbersome task. We believe that the best way
to install Asterisk is to compile from the source code, so we won’t discuss prebuilt
*
binaries very much in this book―and besides, don’t you want to be l33t? In the next
chapter, we’ll look at how to initially configure Asterisk and several kinds of channels.

Installing Additional Prompts

Additional prompts are installed via the menuselect application in your Asterisk source
directory. There are three sets of audio packages: Core Sound, Extra Sound, and Music
On Hold File. Each set of packages is broken down into different formats (and the Core
Sound packages are available in multiple languages). Using the menuselect application,

# Gentoo doesn’t actually use a precompiled binary, but rather pulls the source from a repository, and builds
and installs the software using its own package management system. But the version you get is still dependant
upon the maintainers packaging it for you, when you could simply build it yourself!
* l33t is a funny way of saying “elite,” known as leetspeak (computer slang). Even more funny is a well-written,
serious article by Microsoft about leetspeak at http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/
leetspeak.mspx.

50 | Chapter 3: Installing Asterisk