Packages or Source?

Installing executables from packages or installers is the easiest way to go and requiresfewer dependencies (you will need no source-code downloading, no code-compilation tools, or development libraries. And that's a lot of stuff!). This is by far less time consuming.

One downside is that you end up with a directory structure that's different from what you will read in this book, or in anyFreeSWITCH documentation. That is because each Operating System, and each Linux distribution, requires packages to install stuff in a specific directories layout, for example, executables in /usr/bin/ and documentation in /usr/share/doc/freeswitch/. Also, each Linux distribution may have its own specific locations for particular files. Contrast this with the results of installing FreeSWITCH from source with default "configur" values: all will be installed in a tree under /usr/local/freeswitch/.

We'll see below that at the end of installation from packages, we'll create symlinks to mimic the default source installation and conform to documentation.