The Phoronix Test Suite can run on almost any Linux distribution along with Apple Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, webOS / Optware, and other operating systems. The only Linux distribution-specific bits deal with the external dependencies support feature that are set by individual test profiles. If you are not running one of the supported Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, Arch Linux, Pardus, OpenSuSE, Zenwalk, and CentOS), OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Mac OS X, you may need to install a package manually (as instructed by the Phoronix Test Suite) in order for a test to run. An example of an external dependency would be GCC and the OpenGL Utility Toolkit being needed for test profiles that build an OpenGL benchmark from source-code.
The only required dependencies for the Phoronix Test Suite on Linux systems is PHP 5.x CLI (packages for it are commonly called php5-cli or php-cli or just php). It's important to note that only PHP 5 is needed and not a web server (Apache) or other packages commonly associated with PHP. Additionally, the PHP GD module (commonly called php-gd or php5-gd) is recommended to render graphs to PNG image files, but other renderers are available. Likewise, if you wish to use the Adobe SWF renderer, the PHP Ming module (commonly called php-ming or php5-ming) is required. If you wish to use the result-file-to-pdf option, the PHP FPDF (commonly called php-fpdf or php5-fpdf) module is needed.
There is a GTK2 interface written for the Phoronix Test Suite that can be used by running phoronix-test-suite gui. In order to use the GTK user interface, the PHP GTK module must be installed and loaded. This PHP module can be found at gtk.php.net. PHP GTK for Mac OS X can be found here. For instructions on building PHP GTK for Ubuntu/Debian, see this forum thread. Also highly recommended, but not required, is installing PHP CURL and PHP PCNTL support if they are not built by default with your PHP package.
Note #1: Depending upon your distribution's package configuration, you may also need php-posix package for providing the POSIX functions.
Note #2: You may need to modify the php.ini file on your system in order to support uploading results to Phoronix Global or logging into your Phoronix Global account. The allow_url_fopen, file_uploads, and allow_url_include options must be set to true in the PHP configuration and curl must be supported by the PHP installation. Additional information.
While PHP is the only required dependency, many of the test profiles do require the standard Linux development tools/libraries (GCC, etc). On a clean Ubuntu installation, it's as easy as first running sudo apt-get install php5-cli and then running the Phoronix Test Suite as it will take care of installing additional dependencies. Most Phoronix Test Suite development is done on Ubuntu and Fedora systems, but the Phoronix Test Suite is routinely tested against a variety of Linux distributions and other supported operating systems.
The Phoronix Test Suite has a feature known as "External Dependencies" where the Phoronix Test Suite can attempt to automatically install some of the test-specific dependencies on supported distributions. If running on a distribution where there is currently no External Dependencies profile, the needed package name(s) are listed. To see all possible External Dependencies, run phoronix-test-suite list-possible-dependencies. Running phoronix-test-suite list-missing-dependencies will attempt to report the external dependencies that are not installed on the given system.
If manually changing the location of the phoronix-test-suite launcher file, the PTS_USER_DIR environmental variable must be adjusted inside the file to reflect the absolute location that leads to the root directory of the pts and pts-core folders. The pts folder houses the XML test profiles, XML test suites, test resource files, and other important information. The pts-core directory contains the "engine" of the Phoronix Test Suite.
The Phoronix Test Suite can be simply extracted from the downloaded .tar.gz file or it can also be installed system-wide. If you just wish to run the Phoronix Test Suite without installing it, open a terminal and run ./phoronix-test-suite <options> from the same directory.
Running install-sh from the root directory of the Phoronix Test Suite will install the software for system-wide access. By default the phoronix-test-suite executable is in /usr/bin/, the Phoronix Test Suite files in /usr/share/phoronix-test-suite/, and the documentation in /usr/share/doc/phoronix-test-suite/. Root access is required. The default installation prefix is /usr/ but can be adjusted as the first argument (example: install-sh /home/user/ to install the Phoronix Test Suite in your home directory).
Debian/Ubuntu users are able to follow the Generic Installation instructions or optionally can generate their own Debian package. If dpkg-dev is installed, run php pts-core/static/scripts/build-package-deb.php and a Debian package will be generated which can be subsequently installed. This package contains the phoronix-test-suite executable in /usr/bin/, the Phoronix Test Suite files in /usr/share/phoronix-test-suite/, and the documentation in /usr/share/doc/phoronix-test-suite/.
Phoronix Media maintains a Debian package repository for the Phoronix Test Suite of all the latest releases. To use this repository, add the following line deb http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo pts.debian/ to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list file. A phoronix-test-suite package can also be found in the official Ubuntu universe repository beginning with the Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) release, but it may be out of date compared to our latest version.
The Phoronix Test Suite can be installed on Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS systems using the generic installation method. Alternatively, a phoronix-test-suite package is available in recent versions of the Fedora repository and in the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Gentoo ebuild's for the Phoronix Test Suite have been created by users and can be currently found in the Gentoo BugZilla.
Phoronix Test Suite packages are available through Mandriva Cooker starting with the Mandriva Linux 2009 release. These packages were made by Stephane Teletchea.
The Phoronix Test Suite core (pts-core) is supported on Solaris and OpenSolaris platforms, but some features may not fully function. Additionally, the PTS External Dependencies feature is supported on OpenSolaris using IPS (the Image Packaging System). However, not all test profiles are supported on Solaris / OpenSolaris, and it may be in violation of your end-user agreement to perform such benchmarks on the Sun Solaris operating system. Using the OpenSolaris Image Packaging System, installing SUNWphp524 will provide PHP, PHP GD, and related dependencies.
The Phoronix Test Suite also supports *BSD operating systems. However, like the Solaris support, not all test profiles are compatible with BSD operating systems, but pts-core has been tested against FreeBSD 7.0/7.2/8.0, NetBSD, PC-BSD 7.1, and OpenBSD 4.4/4.6.
The Phoronix Test Suite is fully supported on Apple's Mac OS X operating system. PHP ships with Mac OS X by default so it's as easy as just downloading the Phoronix Test Suite package, extracting it, and running the executable. For tests that rely upon a compiler, Apple's XCode with GCC will need to be installed.
The Phoronix Test Suite support on Windows is in development and will function just fine, but is not yet feature complete compared to the other operating systems support. At this time the Phoronix Test Suite client is dependent upon PHP being installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php. The Phoronix Test Suite also uses CPU-Z for much of the hardware detection support on Windows and is dependent upon CPU-Z being installed to C:\Program Files\CPUID\CPU-Z\cpuz.exe if you wish to utilize this hardware reporting feature. In terms of the Microsoft Windows support, right now the Phoronix Test Suite is developed and solely tested against Windows 7 x64.
If you are a company or simply own multiple computers, the download caching support of the Phoronix Test Suite can work quite well. This feature allows you to very simply setup a local (or network-wide) repository for the Phoronix Test Suite of all the files the different tests use. After you have installed the tests on one system that you normally use (or have ran phoronix-test-suite install all) running phoronix-test-suite make-download-cache will cache all of the files that each test downloaded. The location of this cache is ~/.phoronix-test-suite/download-cache/.
Once the cache has been created, you can copy this folder to other systems and place the files in the same location. Then when the Phoronix Test Suite needs to download a file for a test, before downloading it from the Internet it will first check this cache for the file(s). If the files are there and the MD5 check-sums have been verified, it will simply copy the file -- thereby saving bandwidth and time. The download cache location can be downloaded in ~/.phoronix-test-suite/user-config.xml. By adjusting the download cache, you could setup the cache folder to be on an FTP or NFS share (as an example) on a server that's accessible via your LAN. Configure your test systems to use this local repository and you will be saving time and bandwidth.