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Installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher on Ubuntu with Wine

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NOTE: This article shows a usage of PRTG which is rated "experimental". Please understand that using PRTG on Linux/Wine is not officially supported by the Paessler Support Team.

You do not need a Windows based computer (and a Windows license) to use most of PRTG's features. You can also run PRTG Traffic Grapher 6.x on Linux. Using the "Wine Library" (which emulates Windows system calls) you can run PRTG like most other Windows apps on Linux systems. Of course some hardware/driver-based features like Packet Sniffing do not work.

For this tutorial the following steps will

  • create a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation 6,
  • install Ubuntu 7.10 onto the virtual machine,
  • install Wine 0.9.52 onto Ubuntu and
  • install PRTG 6.x onto Ubuntu/Wine

Afterwards you will be able to use most of PRTG's functionality under Linux (mainly the SNMP based monitoring, latency monitoring, reporting, notifications and the internal webserver).

Installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher 6.x on Ubuntu 7.10 and Wine 0.9.52

  • Created a new VM with a 5 GB drive (should be pre-allocated) In VMWare Workstation 6
  • Downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 Installer ISO file from www.ubuntu.com
  • Installed Ubuntu from the ISO file into the VMWare Image
  • Booted Ubuntu
  • Opened a command line/terminal and Firefox
  • Opened the Wine Website in the Browser www.winehq.org/site/download-deb
  • Marked the following command lines commands each with the mouse in the browser and clicked into the command line window with left+right mouse button to paste the commands: 
    wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
		sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
		sudo apt-get update
		sudo apt-get install wine
  • Now Wine is installed.
  • You should also install the Microsoft Windows Fonts 
    $sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
		$sudo fc-cache -fv
    See ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/09/09/installing-microsoft-fonts/ for more information 
  • Download PRTG Installer using the browser from www.paessler.com/download/prtg
  • Unzip the setup.exe from the ZIP file
  • Run the setup.exe
  • During Installation select "do not install the PRTG Watchdog service" (services do not work in Wine)
  • At the end of the installation PRTG Traffic Grapher will be started automatically.
  • When running PRTG there are three steps you should perform before you set up any sensors:
    • Disable "Run as Service" (See Extras|Options dialog in the "System" section)
    • Click on the "Browser" icon in the left toolbar once. Wine will ask if you want to download the Gecko engine. Answer with yes.
    • Close the progam once and restart it

Running PRTG 6.x on Wine/Linux: Notes and Tips

During our tests we found the following issues (Ubuntu 7.10, Wine 0.9.52, PRTG 6.2.0.902):

  • PRTG's Packet-Sniffer does not work on Wine/Linux (incompatible architecture)
  • The internal webserver is currently only available on IP 127.0.1.1 (you can not change the IP)
  • The build-in browser (Browser OCX Control) does not work

What we did not test yet: Printing, NetFlow Monitoring

Hint for users that are new to Wine: In case PRTG or the Wine-process stop working, the command "wineserver -k" will kill the process and you can start again

By Category

PRTG Traffic Grapher V6