Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition

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 this chapter we’re going to walk through the installation of Asterisk from the source code. Many people shy away from this method, claiming that it is too difficult and time-consuming. Our goal here is to demonstrate that installing Asterisk from source is not actually that difficult to do. More importantly, we want to provide you with the best Asterisk platform on which to learn.

In this book we will be helping you build a functioning Asterisk system from scratch. In this chapter you will build a base platform for your Asterisk system. Given that we are installing from source, there is potentially a lot of variation in how you can do this. The process we discuss here is one that we’ve used for many years, and following it will provide you with a suitable foundation for Asterisk.

As part of this process we will also explain installation of some of the software dependencies on the Linux platform that will be needed for topics we’ll cover later (such as database integration). We will show instructions for installing Asterisk on both RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) version 6.3 and Ubuntu (a Debian-based distribution) version 12.04, which we believe covers the vast majority ...