Building htop

Building htop

Below versions of htop are available in respective distributions at the time of the creation of these build instructions:

• RHEL 8.2 and 8.4 has 3.0.5 available in the EPEL
• SLES 12 SP5 has 2.0.2-9.1
• SLES 15.2 and 15.3 has 3.0.5
• Ubuntu 18.04 has 2.1.0
• Ubuntu 20.04 has 2.2.0
• Ubuntu 21.04 has 3.0.5

The instructions provided below specify the steps to build htop v3.1.1 on Linux on IBM Z for following distributions:

• RHEL (7.8, 7.9, 8.2, 8.4)
• SLES (12 SP5, 15 SP2, 15 SP3)
• Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 20.04)

General Notes:

• When following the steps below please use a standard permission user unless otherwise specified.

• A directory /<source_root>/ will be referred to in these instructions, this is a temporary writable directory anywhere you'd like to place it.

Step 1: Build using script

If you want to build htop using manual steps, go to STEP 2.

Use the following commands to build htop using the build script. Please make sure you have wget installed.

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linux-on-ibm-z/scripts/master/Htop/3.1.1/build_htop.sh

# Build htop
bash build_htop.sh

If the build completes successfully, go to STEP 7. In case of error, check logs for more details or go to STEP 2 to follow manual build steps.

2. Install the dependencies

• RHEL (7.8, 7.9)

   sudo yum install -y ncurses ncurses-devel gcc git make wget tar xz autoconf libtool 

• RHEL (8.2, 8.4)

   sudo yum install -y ncurses ncurses-devel gcc git make wget tar automake

• SLES (12 SP5, 15 SP2, 15 SP3)

   sudo zypper install -y ncurses ncurses-devel gcc git make wget tar awk autoconf libtool xz

• Ubuntu (18.04)

   sudo apt-get install -y gcc git make wget tar libncursesw5 libcunit1-ncurses libncursesw5-dev autoconf

• Ubuntu (20.04, 21.04)

   sudo apt-get -y install gcc git make wget tar libncursesw5 libcunit1-ncurses libncursesw5-dev automake

3. Install automake 1.16.5 (For RHEL 7.x, SLES, Ubuntu 18.04)

    cd /<source_root>/
    wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.16.5.tar.gz
    tar -xvf automake-1.16.5.tar.gz
    cd automake-1.16.5
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
    export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

4. Download and unpack the htop 3.1.1 source code

    cd /<source_root>/
    git clone https://github.com/htop-dev/htop.git
    cd htop
    git checkout 3.1.1

5. Configure and build htop-3.1.1

    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure
    make

6. Install htop

    sudo make install

7. Launch htop to monitor system

    htop 

Note: For a list of supported key commands see the manual page man htop on ubuntu.

References:

• https://htop.dev/