James Scott
First you need a machine running Linux (I used Fedora Core 1 to build the prototype), with at least 4 and preferably 6 PCI slots free. You then need to obtain 4-6 PCI sound cards using the CMPCI linux driver - i.e. C-Media PCI sound cards. We bought these on www.dabs.com for the prototype. If you cannot find those sound cards, you will have to port the kernel modifications from the CMPCI driver to the driver for your sound cards - not such a huge task, but requiring a bit of a learning curve for someone who has not developed kernel drivers before.
Next you need to create a custom kernel with the sound card driver patch. The patch used in the prototype, for Linux 2.4.22, is found here. Google for instructions on how to apply kernel patches if you do not know. I also used a patch for low latency, which is standard in Linux 2.6 - this is found here. Porting the driver changes to Linux 2.6 would not be too difficult, but I have not done so. Build the kernel (again, google for information on compiling linux kernels if you don't know how) -- for reference, for the prototype machine I used the kernel configuration here.
By now you should have a machine with many sound cards which boots into Linux using the modified kernel. The script here should be run as root to create entries in the /dev directory for all those sound devices. You should be able to test that these microphones are working correctly using any open source sound apps - I recommend baudline (google for it).
Now you need the audio location code... this is found in the zip file: audiolocation-release-1.0.zip. The license for this code is GNU GPL. The "main" class is AudioLocation.java. After compiling the code (again, google is your friend), running this class will bring up a GUI which allows you to specify a jpg as a backdrop, to specify where the microphones are, and to add "button" in 3D. You can save the configuration to a file, and in future start the AudioLocation specifying the configuration file on the command line if you prefer. The "buttons" can cause execution of shell commands, thus allowing you to control devices easily.
Finally read HOWTO-audiolocation-setup.txt - how to set up audio location system for a particular environment and set of microphones. Good luck!