Obtaining the Source Files | Installing Asterisk

The very first step we must undertake is to obtain the source files. When obtaining the source code, we have two major choices. We can either download the latest version through Digium's web site from http://www.asterisk.org/downloads or use svn to obtain the latest stable release. The maintainers of Asterisk have been doing a good job of keeping the stable releases available on the FTP servers, so we will use this method.

The commands we issue to download Asterisk's source files are:

# mkdir -p /usr/src/asterisk

# cd /usr/src/asterisk

# wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-
1.6.1-current.tar.gz

# wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-
addons -1.6.1-current.tar.gz

# wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux-complete/
dahdi-1inux-complete-current.tar.gz

# wget http://downloads.digium.com/pub/libpri/libpri-1.4-current.tar.gz

The download may take anywhere from about one minute on an extremely fast connection, to a couple of hours on a slow connection. When the download is complete, we will need to unpack the tarballs.

For unpacking the tarballs, you will want to issue a tar -xvzf [name of file] (without the brackets):

# tar -zxf dahdi-linux-complete-current.tar.gz
# tar -zxf asterisk-1.6.1-current.tar.gz
# tar -zxf libpri-1.4-current.tar.gz
# tar -zxf asterisk-addons-1.6.1-current.tar.gz

In the next three sections, we'll compile and install the source distributions we've just downloaded. Note that we should install DAHDI first, then LibPRI, and finally Asterisk.