RRDTool on Debian GNU/Linux Tutorial

Index

Introduction

The latest RRDtool version in the Debian GNU/Linux Stable (Etch) system is 1.2.19, that is one reason why you want to install RRDtool from the source package. This HOWTO decribes how to do that. (I'm going to install RRDtool in /data/rrd/src/).

Preparation

First of all weed need to install the following stuff

apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev libpng12-0 libpng12-dev libfreetype6 \ 
libfreetype6-dev libart-2.0-2 libart-2.0-dev librrd0 librrd0-dev

RRDtool

Now we need to download the RRDtool tarball from the RRDtool website and unpack it

wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.2.23.tar.gz
gzip -d rrdtool-1.2.23.tar.gz
tar -xvf rrdtool-1.2.23.tar

After unpacking it, we need to compile RRDtool

cd rrdtool-1.2.23
./configure --prefix=/data/rrd/src
make && make install

Label Hack

This is a hack to remove that 'RRDTOOL / TOBI OETIKER' label at the graph

First of all we need to search this line in src/rrd_graph.c

"RRDTOOL / TOBI OETIKER");

This line has to be

"");

Now we have to recompile RRDtool

cd rrdtool-1.2.23
./configure --prefix=/data/rrd/src
make && make install

The result is (compare with the graph at the top!):

If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to write me an email (alex@you need to remove this!krogloth.de) or join the rrdtool channel (#rrdtool) on the IRCnet.