Installing Netatalk on Debian Linux
Install the latest Netatalk
Netatalk is distributed as a deb package in all Debian releases except Debian 12 Bookworm. You can install it with apt and other package managers.
Note that these instructions also apply to Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) as the two operating systems behave identically for the purpose of installing and using Netatalk.
Ex. (with root privileges)
apt install netatalk
For building and installing from source yourself, for instance as a Debian Bookworm user, follow the guides linked here.
AppleTalk Support in Kernel
In order to use AppleShare / AFP over AppleTalk (DDP) the Linux system must have an AppleTalk networking stack. Luckily, Debian’s Linux kernel comes with a module called “appletalk”, which provides this functionality. Without an AppleTalk networking stack, you will only be able to use Netatalk with TCP.
To check if your kernel has AppleTalk support, issue this command and inspect the output:
lsmod | grep appletalk
If the module isn’t detected, try launching atalkd first and try again. If atalkd errors out complaining about “Address family not supported by protocol”, you may have to try another version of Linux, or compile the Linux kernel yourself. There are guides elsewhere on this topic that you can follow.
Using Netatalk
At this point, you should be able to run the Netatalk daemons on your system.
If you start netatalk on its own, you get the AFP-over-TCP transport layer only.
To get AFP-over-AppleTalk, start atalkd before netatalk.
$ sudo systemctl enable atalkd
$ sudo systemctl enable netatalk
$ sudo systemctl start atalkd
$ sudo systemctl start netatalk
Afterwards, you can run optional AppleTalk services:
sudo systemctl enable papd.service timelord.service a2boot.service
sudo systemctl start papd.service timelord.service a2boot.service
Footnotes
This is a mirror of the Netatalk GitHub Wiki
Last updated 2026-05-09
