Installing Zabbix v1.6.1 on Debian Etch

As of this writing, Etch is the current "stable" version of Debian.

This is how to install Zabbix!

1. Add an unstable deb-src repository to your sources.list. If you have problems later, make sure the following deb-src line is the only deb-src line in your sources.list file.

   echo "deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
   

2. Update your package repository

   apt-get update
   

3. Install necessary packages for this compiling project

   apt-get install libcurl3-dev build-essential automake1.9  libsnmp9-dev libiksemel-dev libopenipmi-dev libpq-dev
   

4. Download source

   cd /tmp
   apt-get source zabbix
   cd zabbix-1.6.1
   

5. Modify source because etch doesn't have libcurl4. Modify the control file (line 6) where it says "libcurl4-gnutls-dev" with "libcurl3-dev"

   vi debian/control
   

6. Compile source. If you're missing packages, this command will tell you what other packages you need to install before this command works properly.

   dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
   

7. Install fresh packages

   cd ..
   ls -l *deb
   dpkg -i ./<zabbix package of your choice>.deb
   

All done. Remember, this guide doesn't tell you how to use Zabbix. I suggest you look in the /usr/share/doc/zabbix* directories that the packages created. Also, read the documentation, forums, wiki, etc.

Enjoy.