Installing Phoronix Test Suite

Phoronix Test Suite is one of the most famous benchmarking suite on Linux (even though it can be installed on Windows, OpenSolaris, BSD, and Mac OS X lately). It has 130+ Test Profiles and 60+ Test Suites which should be more than enough to do major benchmarking on an overall system performance.

There are some of the highlights of Phoronix Test Suite:
1. 130+ Test Profiles
2. 60+ Test Suites
3. Extensible Testing Architecture
4. Optional Linux-based LiveDVD/USB Testing Distribution (PTS Desktop Live)
5. Automated Test Installation
6. Dependency Management Support
7. Module-based Plug-In Architecture
8. PNG, JPG, GIF, Adobe SWF, SVG Graph Rendering Support
9. Automated Batch Mode Support
10. Global Database For Result Uploads, Benchmark Comparisons
11. Detailed Software, Hardware Detection
12. System Monitoring Support
13. GTK2 Graphical User Interface + Command-Line Interface
14. Runs On Linux, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, Windows 7, & BSD Operating Systems

Here's how i install PTS on my desktop running Slackware-Current:

• Make sure you have PHP package installed (i'm compiling PHP 5.3.3 from source rather than using Slackware's default PHP package, but the default package should be sufficient)
  
• Go to Download page and download the generic package (i'm using 2.8.1)
• Extract the package and run the install-sh script using root
• That's it. So simple

Hey, wait.... i saw a GUI interface on the website, but how come it ended using command line interface? By default, PTS only runs in CLI, but you have an option to make it run on GUI using PHP-GTK. Here's how to do it:

• You would like to install cairo from PECL repository by issuing

pecl install channel://pecl.php.net/cairo-0.2.0


• Add this line on your /etc/php.ini (location may vary depending on your configuration):
  

extension=cairo.so

• Make sure you have cairo on your phpinfo() outputs
• Download the php-gtk from SVN (the latest version of php-gtk2 is not compatible with PHP 5.3.x series. Either you can use SVN or downgrade to 5.2.x series for now). Execute:

svn co http://svn.php.net/repository/gtk/php-gtk/trunk php-gtk

• Build the package by going to the php-gtk directory and execute :

./buildconf; ./configure --enable-php-gtk; make

• Install the package by running:

make install

• Add this line on /etc/php.ini (location may vary depending on your configuration):
  

extension=php_gtk2.so


• Run phoronix-test-suite gui
• You will get the GUI and you can start profiling your system

Credit goes to UbuntuForums about the solution provided to compile php-gtk2 on newer version of PHP 5.3.x.