After installing it using Method 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, you can read the
man pages, and try out the commands:
man smartd.conf
man smartctl
man smartd
# Only root can do this
/usr/sbin/smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/hda
/usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda
Note that the default location for the manual pages are
/usr/share/man/man5 and /usr/share/man/man8. If
'man' doesn't find them, then you may need to add
/usr/share/man to your MANPATH environment
variable.
The Windows package (see Method 6 above) provides preformatted man pages
in *.html and *.txt format.
First Method - Install from your distributions RPM file
Starting with smartmontools release 5.37, RPM files
are no longer available at the smartmontools project download page.
Refer to the package download location of your distribution.
On Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS (both in versions 5 and newer) and Fedora
Linux distributions
Other distributions providing RPM packages
Second Method (Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Cygwin) - Install from the source tarball
- Download the latest source tarball from here.
Note: you probably want the most recent stable release. Stable releases have
even-numbered extensions, and unstable experimental releases have
odd-numbered extensions.
- Uncompress the tarball:
tar zxvf smartmontools-5.38.tar.gz
- The previous step created a directory called smartmontools-5.38
containing the code. Go to that directory, build, and install:
cd smartmontools-5.38
./configure
make
make install
- For releases >=5.19, ./configure
can take optional arguments. These optional arguments are fully explained in the
INSTALL
file. The most important one is --prefix to change the default installation directories.
Please note that the default installation location changed in versions >=5.31.
If you don't pass any arguments to ./configure all files will reside under
/usr/local to not interfere with files from your distribution. For more detailed
information please also refer to the
INSTALL
document.
- To compile from another directory (avoids overwriting virgin files from the smartmontools package)
replace ./configure [options] by:
mkdir objdir
cd objdir
../configure [options]
- To install to another destination (useful for testing and to avoid overwriting an existing smartmontools installation)
replace make install by:
make DESTDIR=/home/myself/smartmontools-test install
Use a full path: ~/smartmontools-test won't work.
- Unless the destination directory is your home directory (or a location that you have write permission)
# only root can do that:
make install
Third Method - Install latest unreleased code from CVS repository
- Due to the new SourceForge CVS
architecture, the hostname for CVS access has changed from
cvs.sourceforge.net to smartmontools.cvs.sourceforge.net.
To update a copy of smartmontools checked out before 2006-05-12, change all
the */CVS/Root files accordingly.
- One of the really cool things about CVS is that you can get
any version of the code you want, from the first release up the
the most current development version. And it's trivial, because
each release is tagged with a name like
RELEASE_5_38. You can see what the different names are
by looking at the
CVS repository. You'll see the tag names in the little scroll
window where it says "Show only files with tag". All you need to
do to get the latest development code is
(but note that the development code may be unstable, and that the
documentation and code may be inconsistent):
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@smartmontools.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/smartmontools login
# when prompted for a password, just press Enter
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@smartmontools.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/smartmontools co sm5
- To instead get the RELEASE_5_37 release:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@smartmontools.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/smartmontools co -r RELEASE_5_37 sm5
- This will create a subdirectory called sm5/ containing the
code. Go to that directory, build, and install:
cd sm5
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install
- See notes under Second method - install from source tarball for different options to ./configure
and other useful remarks.
- Skip ./autogen.sh and ./configure for tagged releases
<= 5.1-18 (RELEASE_5_X_Y, where X = 0 or 1 and Y = 0 to 18).
- If you get the current sources (cvs co with no arguments or do cvs up
-A) then you will need those two additional steps.
- To update your sources to the RELEASE_5_38 release:
cd sm5
cvs up -r RELEASE_5_38
- To update any tagged release to the latest development code:
cd sm5
cvs up -A
Fourth Method (Debian Linux) - Install the Debian package
Fifth Method (Windows with
Cygwin installed) - Install the Cygwin package
- Starting with CVS snapshot 2005-11-15, smartmontools is part of
the
Cygwin distribution.
A list of available smartmontools packages and their contents is
here.
- To update your installation, click on the "Install or update now!"
link on the
Cygwin web page.
This downloads setup.exe to your system.
Then, run setup and answer all of the questions.
Select smartmontools package in the "Utils" category.
- The optional source package (smartmontools-*-src.tar.bz2)
can be used to build both the Cygwin and the Windows binary packages
on Cygwin.
Refer to the file /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/smartmontools-*.README
for details.
Sixth Method (Windows) - Install the Windows package
- Download and run the latest smartmontools
NSIS-installer
(*.win32-setup.exe) from
here.
- The default install type "Full" creates start menu shortcuts
including an uninstaller, and adds the install directory to the PATH variable.
- Select install type "Extract files only" to disable these extra
components.
- Virus scanners occasionally produce false positive virus reports for
NSIS-installers, see the
NSIS False Positives page.
If this is the case for the smartmontools installer, please send a report to the
smartmontools-support
mailing list.
- Starting with smartmontools release 5.37, the Windows package
is no longer provided as a ZIP archive (*.win32.zip).
If the self extracting installer cannot be used for some reason, the files may also
be unpacked by a recent version of
7-Zip.
- More recent (and probably unstable) Windows test releases build from CVS
snapshots are available
here.