Why do I want to do this?
Well, I have experience with Asterisk 1.0 and 1.2, but never had the patience to get 1.4 to work.

Okay, what are ya gonna do?
So what I want to do is create a base system with Etch, install the dependencies from apt, and install Asterisk (together with the web interface) from source.

Well, first of all, you will need something to install it on.
For these kind of cases, I abuse VMWare.

So after first creating a new virtual machine in VMWare Server Console, I logged into ssh to the host server.
Note that I’m using bridged networking to make sure I could use the normal ways for using networking (with minimal delay’s).
I had to download the netinstall iso image for Etch, so I went to my iso dir (/usr/src/installers) where all installer iso’s reside.

Then I mounted the Etch netinstall image in the cd drive of the virtual machine, and booted it.

Due to the fact I hate working with the VMWare Server Console, I used the ‘expert’ installation, which will allow me to continue using ssh in a later stage.
Also note that I didn’t select the new GUI, but use text only.

The following screenshots were captured during the installation:

Right, after that, it was time to configure the network.
As this is a server in a datacenter, DHCP is not possible, so I went ahead and configured it manually.

A few minutes later, I could finally switch to ssh installation mode.

After logging in to the remote installation ssh interface, and selecting the ‘go to menu’ option, I was able to select a mirror which would be the installation source.

After this I could continue to the detect disks. And partition disks.
These aren’t really interesting now, as we want to install just one program and play with it a bit.
For your convenience, I added the rest of the installation sequence.

Right, and now to the experiment, the of this has been added as ‘video’ here;
http://www.icheb.nl/icheb_info_blog/FLV/Asterisk/ast14install/ast14install.html

Or just click here to allow javascript to fix it for ya (I don’t know if this will work):
Click here to open movie in thickbox kind of window