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are quite out of date and do not follow the same furious development cycle as Asterisk.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