Asterisk on NetBSD

Asterisk 1.0 and later runs very nicely on NetBSD 2.0 or later - it's not recommended to run on earlier versions of NetBSD because of a lack of native pthreads.

If you're looking for support for Asterisk on NetBSD, you should try the Asterisk Mailing Lists. There is a BSD specific list which is more receptive to non-Linux users.

Installing via pkgsrc

We recommend you install these from NetBSD's great pkgsrc system. The packages you'll want are comms/zaptel-netbsd and comms/asterisk. If you're not using pkgsrc currently - give it a try! Incidentally, pkgsrc also supports several other Operating Systems including MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, IRIX, and some flavors of Linux.

Building Asterisk from source

Some people may prefer to build Asterisk from scratch, to try out the CVS version or for other reasons. Under NetBSD 2.0 and later, building and installing Asterisk is quite simple. You will need the following tools installed:

gmake
bison
ncurses

Once you've got these packages installed, you'll need to edit the Asterisk Makefile and change this line:


LIBS+=-lpthread -lcrypto -lm -L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/pkg/lib -lncurses

to this:

LIBS+=-lpthread -lcrypto -lm -L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/pkg/lib -R /usr/local/lib -R/usr/pkg/lib -lncurses

Hardware support - Zaptel Drivers

There are preliminary "zaptel" drivers for NetBSD available at TASTY LIME. At the moment they support the ztdummy driver, the TDM400P (wcfxs driver), and the X100P and clones (wcfxo) under NetBSD-2.0, NetBSD-3.0_BETA and NetBSD-current.