Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 5th 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. Toward that goal, in this chapter we will build a base platform for your Asterisk system. Since we are installing from source, there is potentially a lot of variation in how you can do this. Our goal here is to deliver a standard sort of platform, suitable for explorations in many areas. It is possible to strip Asterisk down to the very basics and run a very lean machine; however, that exercise is left up to the reader. The process we discuss here is designed to get you up and running quickly and simply, without short-changing you on access to interesting features.

Most of the commands you see are going to be best handled with a series of copy-paste operations (in fact, we strongly recommend you have an electronic ...