I had the need to install netatalk on CentOS 5.4. Sadly there were no easily found precompiled packages of netatalk, so I googled to find some guidance on the best way to do this.
I found a great article on www.linuxquestions.org which gave plenty of hints as to what was required, and to compile from source wasn’t going to be too arduous.
So here is what I did…
Downloaded and installed Oracle (is there anything they don’t yet own?) Berkeley DB
You can find Oracle Berkeley DB through a simple google search. I used version 4.8.30.NC. I found that 5.x didn’t work.
After downloading and extracting Berkeley DB, I compiled with command:
cd db-4.8.30.NC/build_unix
../dist/configure –prefix=/usr/local/db-4.8.30 && make -j 2 && make install
Then downloaded netatalk 2.1.1 and compiled and installed with command:
cd netatalk-2.1.1
./configure –enable-redhat –with-bdb=/usr/local/db-4.8.30 –prefix=/usr/local/netatalk-2.1.1 –with-mutex=x86/gcc-assembly && make -j 2 && make install
Then configured the software from /usr/local/netatalk-2.1.1/etc/netatalk and started the server
chkconfig atalk on
service atalk start
Hope someone finds this useful.
Damo's World 
Definitely found this useful — thank you! I was about ready to set up an Ubuntu box with AFP sharing enabled but your suggestion of installing a down-level version of Berkeley DB did the trick. Thanks again!