I like to know how my computers are performing, Cacti enable me to do that. But installing it in Ubuntu is not as simple as it should be.

Normally a simple apt-get install $program is enough, not so in this case. To be fair apt-get does get all the packages and sorts out the dependancies, but it doesn’t install them in the correct order. So cacti fails to run. I found the following to work:

1. apt-get mysql and get that working. Create a cacti user and database.
2. apt-get apache (not apache2), get that working.
3. apt-get php and get working with apache (hint: check the httpd.conf file for the php include)
4. Get mysql working with php (hint: check the php.ini file and use a phpinfo() to check)
5. apt-get Cacti. Restart apache to pick up the cacti stuff.
6. Visit http://$server/cacti/ If you get the cacti login screen then your done.
7. If you get a page about a missing database and mysql, search the hard disk for a file called cacti.sql, and import this into mysql using the user details and the cacti database you created in step one.
8. Revisit http://$server/cacti/ again, this time you should be able to login.

If you have problems at any stage then look at the programs documentation, this post is more about the order in which you install things using apt-get.