Newbie question (bash: asterisk: command not found)

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Greetings.
I’m following wallingford’s (“switching to voip”) directions for downloading Asterisk from source. With a few modifications (i.e. using “/sbin/modprobe zaptel” instead of simply "modprobe zaptel (which didn’t work on my machine)), the download appeared to go swimmingly. however, when the time came to fire her up with the command “asterisk &”, followed by “asterisk -r”, i get the following reply:
bash: asterisk: command not found
I’m an utter newbie when it comes to linux and asterisk, and no doubt am making a really basic mistake somewhere.
Any thoughts?
Many thanks,
KevaL

2

the clue is in the fact that modprobe by itself doesn’t work … your *nix install is b0rked. you could either locate the asterisk binary in your filesystem and run it specifying the full path, fix the problems with your current OS, or install a fresh one.

as you are both an asterisk and linux newbie, have you looked at asteriskathome.sf.net ??

3

looked at it, and downloaded the iso version, but couldn’t get it to install on this machine. about halfway through the process, it’d tell me that it couldn’t finish the installation process, as ii didn’t seem to have enought hard drive space - this despite the fact that i was loading it onto a new 120 gig drive.

4

it has its quirks !! you could try installing CentOS 4.2 yourself, then use the A@H tarball to do the rest.

5

on my machine, the asterisk binary is located at /usr/sbin. I verified this by running: which asterisk. When bash complains like this, it usually means that it cannot find the file you are trying to execute. try running this: find / -type f -name asterisk. This should return the full path to your asterisk executable. Now try running asterisk with the full path or cd to the directory where it is and run from there.

There may be a better way to do this, but I am a linux/asterisk newbie myself. If this doesn’t work or if you have more questions, let me know and I will try to help you figure them out.

-Don

6

Many thanks for the hints. I reloaded RH 9, reloaded Asterisk, and I’m up and runnin!
Now, to get some cheap IP phones and try this thing out…