The first order of business to install the Icecast system on the Linux box you plan to use as the server. There are two separate applications you need to download and install here: the server software, called icecast, and the source client for audio files, called iceS. I'll start with the server -- drop by the official icecast Web site at http://www.icecast.org/ and get the latest stable release of the server software (this tutorial uses icecast 2.0-beta).

Note that you will need a C compiler and a running Web server in order to use the software (this tutorial uses GCC 3.2 and Apache 1.3.26).
 
Once you've downloaded the source code archive to your Linux server, log in as "root"

$ su -
Password: ****

and extract the source to a temporary directory.

$ cd /tmp
$ tar -xzvf /home/me/icecast-2.0-beta-1.tar.gz

The next step is to configure the package using the provided configure script. Since I'd like to install the server to /usr/local/icecast/, I'll specify that location as an argument to configure.

$ cd /tmp/icecast-2.0-beta-1
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/icecast

Icecast should now have been installed to the directory /usr/local/icecast/.

Next, download and install the iceS binary -- you can get it from the same Web site. You should also download a copy of libshout, which is required by iceS. Here, I've used iceS 0.3 and libshout 2.0.

Once you've downloaded the source code archive to your Linux server, extract the sources to a temporary directory.

$ cd /tmp
$ tar -xzvf /home/me/libshout-2.0.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf /home/me/ices-0.3.tar.gz

Next, configure compile and install libshout,

$ cd /tmp/libshout-2.0
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

followed by iceS.

$ cd /tmp/ices-0.3
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/icecast
$ make
$ make install

iceS should now have been installed to /usr/local/icecast/ -- I've installed it to the same location as the icecast server binary for convenience.

Once you've got the server and source client  installed, the next step is to configure them. I'll start with the server, next.