Installing and configuring Zaptel

Zaptel driver

To compile the Zaptel driver, we first install support for certain functions (a.o. deflate compression method):

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libssl-dev bison debhelper

Specifically the last one (debhelper) can bring a whole slew of extra packages with it, a.o. build-essential, po-debconf, liburi-perl and patch, just to name a few. Next up is to get the zaptel source code, as is delivered with Debian Lenny:

sudo apt-get install zaptel-source

If there are any dependencies not yet satisfied, you'll see those packages come with the source code (e.g. module-assistant).

Once the zaptel source code is on our system, it is up to us to create the driver. Debian can't handle this for us, as the zaptel driver has to precisely match both our hardware platform and the linux kernel we're using. So we're going to compile our own driver - yippee!
Debian has placed the source file package in /usr/src, and it's named zaptel.tar.bz2. Unpack it with sudo tar xjvf; this creates a subdirectory structure /usr/src/modules/zaptel, which then blossoms in four directories. The zaptel directory holds a.o. a script named configure; if we run it, it does a LOT of checking (if we have a suitable compiler, if the system has grep, if we have the right kernel header files etcetera). It should end with the following lines:

configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating build_tools/menuselect-deps
config.status: creating makeopts
config.status: creating build_tools/make_firmware_object
configure: *** Zaptel build successfully configured ***

This means we can now do the actual building:

Zaptel tools

Next up, we need to install the zaptel driver and userland tools (v1.4.11 under Debian 5.0), which will in turn require fxload and libtonezone1. Installation is simply performed by

sudo apt-get install zaptel fxload libtonezone1

After installation, the zaptel driver checks for the existance of /etc/zaptel.conf. When you've never before had Zaptel on your system, you probably get the message

zaptel : /etc/zaptel.conf fails test for exists and readable

This is in fact a friendly reminder that you first have to create this file, before you try to load the driver.

Zaptel configuration

The Zaptel driver is configured by means of its zaptel.conf configuration file. The contents of this file are fairly straightforward: