Gentoo – Zoneminder

The Zoneminder ebuild in the portage tree has been broken for a couple of years now. Here is the process I use to build Zoneminder from source on a Gentoo x86 install:

1. Get Root Access

2. Make The Source Directory

3. Get The Source Package

Stable: 1.25.0

Development: svn

4. Unpack The Sources

5. Install Required Dependencies

Add the following to /etc/portage/package.keywords:

Emerge all dependencies:

Install Sys::Mmap with cpan:

6. Configure and Build Zoneminder

Configure the sources (note this is for a localhost install, you can change it to whatever vhost you want)

Make sure to change the zm db username and password to reflect your setup.

Setup the DB

Import the Initial DB

Build it

After all that Zoneminder should be installed on your system and ready to run. Here are is an init script that I created to get Zoneminder started, stopped and reset as well as allow it to start up and shutdown on a machine power cycle.

Save the file as zoneminder and copy it to /etc/init.d/zoneminder then make sure to run

Now you can start and stop your server by doing:

If you want it to start on power up add it to the default runlevel

Thats it! You should now be able to access the Zoneminder web interface at http://serverip/zm.

Now go buy some cameras!