Friday, September 21, 2007

Htop in FreeBSD

I've always loved the top replacement named htop that's available in linux. I usually run my screen session with rtorrent, mc and htop opened. I was a bit dissapointed where the usually nitty-gritty method of installing software in FreeBSD (using the ports collection) has failed me when trying to get htop working on my server.
Here is a quick reminder for me (and everyone else for that matter) on how to get htop working on FreeBSD along with the linux compatibility layer.

First you have to dynamically load the linux object in the kernel:

kldload linux

Then we have to make this loading permanent so add linux_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf.

After this, install a linux layer:

cd /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-fc4 (for some strange reason fc6 is not working for me)
make install distclean

Go to /etc/fstab and add the following line:

linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

Mount the new filesystem: mount linproc and go to /usr/ports/sysutils/htop and install as usual.

As soon as I figure out a method of getting a screenshot from my box I will post it :D

Bye for now.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

GREAT THANKS!

Anonymous said...

Thanks! htop is very useful when you want to control few CPU cores.

Anonymous said...

You can use scrot for screenshot

mastier said...

you can use "top -P" as well to see multiple cores.
It's shame that this tool wasn't actually natively ported to bsd systems.