Install Asterisk under Debian

Installing Asterisk

Once the hardware configuration part is completed, we can start the installation of Asterisk itself. Using aptitude or apt-get, install package asterisk. On Debian 5.0 "Lenny", it should be Asterisk 1.4.21.2. With apt-get, the command is simply

apt-get install asterisk

Note: many, many dependencies bring a lot of extra packages to your server when you install Asterisk. On a test machine, I counted 24 extra packages (for a total of 11.4MB to be downloaded).

If you have telephony hardware, you've likely already configured it in the preceding sections. However, when Asterisk itself is installed, you can run the genzaptelconf command again, and it will not only re-configure your zaptel.conf, but also it will generate /etc/asterisk/zapata-channels.conf

genzaptelconf -svdM -c nl

Now, as the command suggests, include the zapata-channels.conf file in /etc/asterisk/zapata.conf, either by running

echo '#include zapata-channels.conf' >>/etc/asterisk/zapata.conf

or by opening zapata.conf in your favourite text editor and pasting the line "#include zapata-channels.conf" (including the hash sign) somewhere near the end of the file.