Smartmontools installation instructions ======================================= $Id: INSTALL 3555 2012-06-01 21:07:33Z chrfranke $ Please also see the smartmontools home page: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ Table of contents: [1] System requirements [2] Installing from SVN [3] Installing from source tarball [4] Guidelines for different Linux distributions [5] Guidelines for FreeBSD [6] Guidelines for Darwin [7] Guidelines for NetBSD [8] Guidelines for Solaris [9] Guidelines for Cygwin [10] Guidelines for Windows [11] Guidelines for OS/2, eComStation [12] Guidelines for OpenBSD [13] Comments [14] Detailed description of ./configure options [1] System requirements ======================= A) Linux Any Linux distribution will support smartmontools if it has a kernel version greater than or equal to 2.2.14. So any recent Linux distribution should support smartmontools. There are two parts of smartmontools that may require a patched or nonstandard kernel: (1) To get the ATA RETURN SMART STATUS command, the kernel needs to support the HDIO_DRIVE_TASK ioctl(). (2) To run Selective Self-tests, the kernel needs to support the HDIO_DRIVE_TASKFILE ioctl(). If your kernel does not support one or both of these ioctls, then smartmontools will "mostly" work. The things that don't work will give you harmless warning messages. For item (1) above, any 2.4 or 2.6 series kernel will provide HDIO_DRIVE_TASK support. Some 2.2.20 and later kernels also provide this support IF they're properly patched and configured. [Andre Hedrick's IDE patches may be found at http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/ide-2.2.20/ or are available from your local kernel.org mirror. They are not updated for 2.2.21 or later, and may contain a few bugs.]. If the configuration option CONFIG_IDE_TASK_IOCTL exists in your 2.2.X kernel source code tree, then your 2.2.X kernel will probably support this ioctl. [Note that this kernel configuration option does NOT need to be enabled. Its presence merely indicates that the required HDIO_DRIVE_TASK ioctl() is supported.] For item (2) above, your kernel must be configured with the kernel configuration option CONFIG_IDE_TASKFILE_IO enabled. This configuration option is present in all 2.4 and 2.6 series kernels. Some 2.2.20 and later kernels also provide this support IF they're properly patched and configured as described above. Please see FAQ section of the URL above for additional details. If you are using 3ware controllers, for full functionality you must either use version 1.02.00.037 or greater of the 3w-xxxx driver, or patch earlier 3ware 3w-xxxx drivers. See http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/3w-xxxx.txt for the patch. The version 1.02.00.037 3w-xxxx.c driver was incorporated into kernel 2.4.23-bk2 on 3 December 2003 and into kernel 2.6.0-test5-bk11 on 23 September 2003. B) FreeBSD For FreeBSD support, a 5-current kernel that includes ATAng is required in order to support ATA drives. Even current versions of ATAng will not support 100% operation, as the SMART status can not be reliably retrieved. There is patch pending approval of the ATAng driver maintainer that will address this issue. C) Solaris The SCSI code has been tested on a variety of Solaris 8 and 9 systems. ATA/IDE code only works on SPARC platform. All tested kernels worked correctly. D) NetBSD/OpenBSD The code was tested on a 1.6ZG (i.e., 1.6-current) system. It should also function under 1.6.1 and later releases (unverified). Currently it doesn't support ATA devices on 3ware RAID controllers. E) Cygwin The code was tested on Cygwin 1.7.7-1. It should also work on other recent releases. Both Cygwin and Windows versions of smartmontools share the same code to access the IDE/ATA or SCSI devices. The information in the "Windows" section below also applies to the Cygwin version. F) Windows The code was tested on Windows 98SE, ME, NT4(SP5,SP6), 2000(SP4), XP(up to SP3), 2003, Vista and Windows 7. -- Windows 9x/ME On 9x/ME, only standard (legacy) IDE/ATA devices 0-3 are supported. The driver SMARTVSD.VXD must be present in WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS to get loaded at Windows startup. The default location in a new installation of some versions of Windows is the WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder. In this case, move SMARTVSD.VXD to WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS and reboot (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/265854/en-us). SMARTVSD.VXD relies on the standard IDE port driver ESDI_506.PDR. If the system uses a vendor specific driver, access of SMART data is not possible. Some ATA controllers (e.g. Promise) provided a custom SMARTVSD.VXD for their Win9x/ME driver. To access SMART data from both the legacy (/dev/h[a-d]) and this additional (/dev/hd[e-h]) controller, rename this file to SMARTVSE.VXD. Open the file with a hex editor and replace all occurrences of the string "SMARTVSD" with "SMARTVSE". Then reinstall the original Windows SMARTVSD.VXD. To access SCSI and USB devices, an installed ASPI interface (WNASPI32.DLL) is required. The code was tested with Adaptec Windows ASPI drivers 4.71.2. (http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/_eol/scsi_sw/ASPI-4.70/) Links to other ASPI drivers can be found at http://www.nu2.nu/aspi/. -- Windows NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista/Win7 ATA or SATA devices are supported if the device driver implements the SMART IOCTLs or IOCTL_IDE_PASS_THROUGH or IOCTL_ATA_PASS_THROUGH. The ATA SMART READ LOG command (smartctl -l, --log, -a, --all) is not supported if only the SMART IOCTLs are implemented. SCSI and USB devices are accessed through SPTI. Special driver support is not required. 3ware 9000 RAID controllers are supported using features available in the Windows driver release 9.4.0 (3wareDrv.sys 3.0.2.70) or later. Older drivers provide SMART access to the first physical drive (port) of each logical drive (unit). If driver support is not available (7000/8000 series, 9000 on XP 64), smartctl can be used to parse SMART data output from CLI or 3DM. G) MacOS/Darwin The code was tested on MacOS 10.3.4. It should work from 10.3 forwards. It doesn't support 10.2. It's important to know that on 10.3.x, some things don't work (see WARNINGS): due to bugs in the libraries used, you cannot run a short test or switch SMART support off on a drive; if you try, you will just run an extended test or switch SMART support on. So don't panic when your "short" test seems to be taking hours. It's also not possible at present to control when the offline routine runs. If your drive doesn't have it running automatically by default, you can't run it at all. SCSI devices are not currently supported. Detecting the power status of a drive is also not currently supported. To summarize this, from another point of view, the things that are not supported fall into two categories: * Can't be implemented easily without more kernel-level support, so far as I know: - running immediate offline, conveyance, or selective tests - running any test in captive mode - aborting tests - switching automatic offline testing on or off - support for SCSI - checking the power mode [-n Directive of smartd] (this is not completely impossible, but not by using a documented API) * Work on 10.4 and later, but not on 10.3: - switching off SMART (switching *on* works fine) - switching off auto-save (but why would you want to?) - running the short test (that leaves you with only the extended test) However, some things do work well. For ATA devices, all the informational output is available, unless you want something that only an offline test updates. On many newer Mac OS systems, the hard drive comes with the offline test switched on by default, so even that works. The OS X SAT SMART Driver provides access to SMART data for SAT capable USB and Firewire devices: https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver https://github.com/RJVB/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver This does not require any smartctl -d TYPE option and should work also with older smartmontools releases. H) OS/2, eComStation The code was tested on eComStation 1.1, but it should work on all versions of OS/2. Innotek LibC 0.5 runtime is required. Currently only ATA disks are supported, SCSI support will be added. [2] Installing from SVN ======================= Get the sources from the SVN repository: svn co https://smartmontools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/smartmontools/trunk/smartmontools smartmontools Then type: ./autogen.sh and continue with step [3] below, skipping the "unpack the tarball" step. The autogen.sh command is ONLY required when installing from SVN. You need GNU Autoconf (version 2.50 or greater), GNU Automake (version 1.7 or greater) and their dependencies installed in order to run it. You can get these here: http://directory.fsf.org/project/autoconf/ http://directory.fsf.org/project/automake/ [3] Installing from the source tarball ====================================== If you are NOT installing from SVN, then unpack the tarball: tar zxvf smartmontools-5.VERSION.tar.gz Then: ./configure make make install (you may need to be root to do this) As shown (with no options to ./configure) this defaults to the following set of installation directories: --prefix=/usr/local --sbindir=/usr/local/sbin --sysconfdir=/usr/local/etc --mandir=/usr/local/share/man --docdir=/usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools --with-exampledir=/usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/examplescripts --with-drivedbdir=/usr/local/share/smartmontools --with-initscriptdir=auto --with-systemdsystemunitdir=auto --enable-drivedb --disable-attributelog --disable-sample --disable-savestates --with-libcap-ng=auto --without-selinux These will usually not overwrite existing "distribution" installations on Linux Systems since the FHS reserves this area for use by the system administrator. For different installation locations or distributions, simply add arguments to ./configure as shown in [4] below. If you wish to alter the default C++ compiler flags, set an environment variable CXXFLAGS='your options' before doing ./configure, or else do: make CXXFLAGS='your options' The first output line of smartctl and smartd provides information about release number, last SVN checkin date and revison, platform, and package. The latter defaults to "(local build)" and can be changed by the variable BUILD_INFO, for example: make BUILD_INFO='"(Debian 5.39-2)"' [4] Guidelines for different Linux distributions ================================================ Note: Please send corrections/additions to: smartmontools-support@lists.sourceforge.net Debian: If you don't want to overwrite any distribution package, use: ./configure Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS, http://www.pathname.com/fhs/): ./configure --sbindir=/usr/local/sbin \ --sysconfdir=/usr/local/etc \ --mandir=/usr/local/man \ --docdir=/usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools \ --with-initscriptdir=/usr/local/etc/init.d Red Hat: ./configure --sbindir=/usr/sbin \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --mandir=/usr/share/man \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/smartmontools \ --with-initscriptdir=/etc/rc.d/init.d Slackware: If you don't want to overwrite any "distribution" package, use: ./configure Otherwise use: ./configure --sbindir=/usr/sbin \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --mandir=/usr/share/man \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/smartmontools \ --with-initscriptdir=/etc/rc.d And removepkg smartmontools smartsuite (only root can do this) before make install The init script works on Slackware. You just have to add an entry like the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.M or /etc/rc.d/rc.local: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/smartd ]; then . /etc/rc.d/smartd start fi To disable it: chmod 644 /etc/rc.d/smartd For a list of options: /etc/rc.d/smartd SuSE: ./configure --sbindir=/usr/sbin \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --mandir=/usr/share/man \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/packages/smartmontools-VERSION \ --with-initscriptdir=/etc/init.d \ [5] Guidelines for FreeBSD ========================== To match the way it will installed when it becomes available as a PORT, use the following: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \ --docdir=/usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools-VERSION \ --with-initscriptdir=/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ \ --enable-sample NOTE: --enable-sample will cause the smartd.conf and smartd RC files to be installed with the string '.sample' append to the name, so you will end up with the following: /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/rc.d/smartd.sample [6] Guidelines for Darwin ========================= ./configure --with-initscriptdir=/Library/StartupItems If you'd like to build the i386 version on a powerpc machine, you can use CXX='g++ -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386' \ ./configure --host=i386-apple-darwin \ --with-initscriptdir=/Library/StartupItems [7] Guidelines for NetBSD ========================= ./configure --prefix=/usr/pkg \ --docdir=/usr/pkg/share/doc/smartmontools [8] Guidelines for Solaris ========================== smartmontools has been partially but not completely ported to Solaris. It includes complete SCSI support but no ATA or 3ware support. It can be compiled with either CC (Sun's C++ compiler) or GNU g++. To compile with g++: ./configure [args] make To compile with Sun CC: env CC=cc CXX=CC ./configure [args] make The correct arguments [args] to configure are: --sbindir=/usr/sbin \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --mandir=/usr/share/man \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/smartmontools-VERSION \ --with-initscriptdir=/etc/init.d To start the script automatically on bootup, create hardlinks that indicate when to start/stop in: /etc/rc[S0123].d/ pointing to /etc/init.d/smartd. Create: Ksmartd in rcS.d, rc0.d, rc1.d, rc2.d Ssmartd in rc3.d where is related to such that the higher snum is the lower knum must be. On usual configuration, '95' would be suitable for and '05' for respectively. If you choose these value, you can create hardlinks by: cd /etc sh -c 'for n in S 0 1 2; do ln init.d/smartd rc$n.d/K05smartd; done' sh -c 'for n in 3 ; do ln init.d/smartd rc$n.d/S95smartd; done' [9] Guidelines for Cygwin ========================= Same as Red Hat: ./configure --prefix=/usr \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --mandir='${prefix}/share/man' OR EQUIVALENTLY ./configure --sbindir=/usr/sbin \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --mandir=/usr/share/man \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/smartmontools \ --with-initscriptdir=/etc/rc.d/init.d Using DOS text file type as default for the working directories ("textmode" mount option) is not recommended. Building the binaries and man pages using "make" is possible, but "make dist" and related targets work only with UNIX file type ("binmode" mount option) set. The "autogen.sh" script prints a warning if DOS type is selected. Files may also be checked out with a non-Cygwin SVN client which uses CR/LF for svn:eol-style=native. The "autogen.sh" script has svn:eol-style=LF. Bash option "-o igncr" is not required. [10] Guidelines for Windows =========================== To compile the Windows release with MinGW gcc on MSYS, use: ./configure make Instead of using "make install", copy the .exe files into some directory in the PATH. Cross-compile statically linked 32-bit version with MinGW-w64: ./configure --build=$(./config.guess) \ --host=i686-w64-mingw32 \ LDFLAGS=-static Tested on Cygwin and Debian Linux. Cross-compile statically linked 64-bit version with MinGW-w64: ./configure --build=$(./config.guess) \ --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 \ LDFLAGS=-static Tested on Cygwin and Debian Linux with MinGW-w64 from http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/. WARNING: The smartmontools version for 64-bit Windows is still EXPERIMENTAL. Cross-compile on Cygwin with old gcc-mingw 3.x: ./configure --build=$(./config.guess) \ --host=i686-pc-mingw32 \ CC='gcc-3 -mno-cygwin' \ CXX='g++-3 -mno-cygwin' \ CXXFLAGS='-g -O2 -Wall -W -Wno-format' Cross-compile on Debian Linux with gcc-mingw32: ./configure --build=$(./config.guess) \ --host=i586-mingw32msvc To build the Windows binary distribution, use: make dist-win32 This builds the distribution in directory ./smartmontools-VERSION.win32/ and packs it into ./smartmontools-VERSION.win32.zip To create a Windows installer, use: make installer-win32 This builds the distribution directory and packs it into the self-extracting install program ./smartmontools-VERSION.win32-setup.exe The installer is build using the command "makensis" from the NSIS package. See http://nsis.sourceforge.net/ for documentation and download location. It is also possible to (cross-)build the installer on Linux. This was successfully tested on Debian with package "nsis". To create a combined 32-/64-bit installer, use this in 32-bit build directory if 64-build directory is at ../build64: make builddir_win64=../build64 installer_win32 To both create and run the (interactive) installer, use: make install-win32 Additional make targets are distdir-win32 to build the directory only and cleandist-win32 for cleanup. The binary distribution includes all documentation files converted to DOS text file format and *.html and *.txt preformatted man pages. The tools unix2dos.exe (package cygutils) and zip.exe (package zip or a native Win32 release of Info-ZIP, http://www.info-zip.org) are necessary but may be not installed by Cygwin's default settings. The event message file tool syslogevt.exe (see smartd man page) is included in the binary distribution if message compiler (windmc) and resource compiler (windres) are available. This may be disabled by passing 'WINDMC=no' to configure. To prepare os_win32 directory for MS Visual Studio C++ 2010 [Express], use the following on MSYS or Cygwin: mkdir vctmp && cd vctmp ../configure [... any MinGW option set from above ...] make config-vc10 The MSVC project files (os_win32/smartmontools_vc10.sln, os_win32/smart{ctl,d}_vc10.vcxproj) are included in SVN (but not in source tarball). The target config-vc10 from a Makefile configured for MinGW creates os_win32/{config,svnversion}_vc10.h from ./{config,svnversion}.h. The configure skript must be run outside of the source directory to avoid inclusion of the original config.h. [11] Guidelines for OS/2, eComStation ===================================== To compile the OS/2 code, please run ./os_os2/configure.os2 make make install [12] Guidelines for OpenBSD =========================== To match the way it will installed when it becomes available as a PORT, use the following: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --docdir=/usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools-VERSION \ --without-initscriptdir \ --enable-sample NOTE: --enable-sample will cause the smartd.conf and smartd RC files to be installed with the string '.sample' append to the name, so you will end up with the following: /etc/smartd.conf.sample [13] Comments ============ To compile from another directory, you can replace the step ./configure [options] by the following: mkdir objdir cd objdir ../configure [options] Man pages contents is platform-specific by default. Info specific to other platforms may be not visible. To generate man pages with full contents use: make os_man_filter= To install to another destination (used mainly by package maintainers, or to examine the package contents without risk of modifying any system files) you can replace the step: make install with: make DESTDIR=/home/myself/smartmontools-package install Use a full path. Paths like ./smartmontools-package may not work. After installing smartmontools, you can read the man pages, and try out the commands: man smartd.conf man smartctl man smartd /usr/sbin/smartctl -s on -o on -S on /dev/hda (only root can do this) /usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda (only root can do this) Note that the default location for the manual pages are /usr/share/man/man5 and /usr/share/man/man8. If "man" doesn't find them, you may need to add /usr/share/man to your MANPATH environment variable. Source and binary packages for Windows are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/ Refer to http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Download for any additional download and installation instructions. The following files are installed if ./configure has no options: /usr/local/sbin/smartctl [Executable command-line utility] /usr/local/sbin/smartd [Executable daemon] /usr/local/sbin/update-smart-drivedb [Drive database update script] /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf [Configuration file for smartd daemon] /usr/local/etc/rc.d/init.d/smartd [Init/Startup script for smartd] /usr/local/share/man/man5/smartd.conf.5 [Manual page] /usr/local/share/man/man8/smartctl.8 [Manual page] /usr/local/share/man/man8/smartd.8 [Manual page] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/AUTHORS [Information about the authors and developers] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/CHANGELOG [A log of changes. Also see SVN] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/COPYING [GNU General Public License Version 2] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/INSTALL [Installation instructions: what you're reading!] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/NEWS [Significant bugs discovered in old versions] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/README [Overview] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/TODO [Things that need to be done/fixed] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/WARNINGS [Systems where lockups or other serious problems were reported] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/smartd.conf [Example configuration file for smartd] /usr/local/share/doc/smartmontools/examplescripts/ [Executable scripts for -M exec of smartd.conf (4 files)] /usr/local/share/smartmontools/drivedb.h [Drive database] If /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf exists and differs from the default then the default configuration file is installed as /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf.sample instead. The commands: make htmlman make txtman may be used to build .html and .txt preformatted man pages. These are used by the dist-win32 make target to build the Windows distribution. The commands also work on other operating system configurations if suitable versions of man2html, groff and grotty are installed. On systems without man2html, the following command should work if groff is available: make MAN2HTML='groff -man -Thtml' htmlman Some of the source files are prepared for the documentation generator Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org/). If Doxygen is installed, the command: doxygen creates HTML documentation in doc/html and LaTeX documentation in doc/latex. If TeX is installed, the following command creates a documentation file doc/latex/refman.pdf: ( cd doc/latex && make pdf ) [14] Detailed description of arguments to configure command =========================================================== When you type: ./configure [options] there are six particularly important variables that affect where the smartmontools software is installed. The variables are listed here, with their default values in square brackets, and the quantities that they affect described following that. This is a very wide table: please read it in a wide window. OPTIONS DEFAULT AFFECTS ------- ------- ------- --prefix /usr/local Please see below --sbindir ${prefix}/sbin Directory for smartd/smartctl executables; Contents of smartd/smartctl man pages --docdir ${prefix}/share/doc/smartmontools Location of the documentation (autoconf >= 2.60 only, see also --with-docdir below) --mandir ${prefix}/share/man Directory for smartctl/smartd/smartd.conf man pages --sysconfdir ${prefix}/etc Directory for smartd.conf; Contents of smartd executable; Contents of smartd/smartd.conf man pages; Directory for rc.d/init.d/smartd init script --with-initscriptdir auto Location of init scripts --with-systemdsystemunitdir auto Location of systemd service files --with-docdir ${prefix}/share/doc/smartmontools Location of the documentation --with-exampledir ${docdir}/examplescripts Location of example scripts --enable-sample --disable-sample Adds the string '.sample' to the names of the smartd.conf file and the smartd RC file --with-os-deps os_.o OS dependent module(s) --with-selinux --without-selinux Enables SELinux support. If smartmontools has to create the /dev/tw[ae] device nodes for 3ware/AMCC controllers, this option ensures that the nodes are created with correct SELinux file contexts. --with-libcap-ng --with-libcap-ng=auto Enables/disables libcap-ng support. If enabled and libcap-ng is available, option --capabilities is added to smartd. --disable-drivedb --enable-drivedb Disables default drive database file '${drivedbdir}/drivedb.h' --with-drivedbdir ${prefix}/share/smartmontools Directory for 'drivedb.h' (implies --enable-drivedb) --enable-savestates --disable-savestates Enables default smartd state files '${savestates}MODEL-SERIAL.ata.state' --with-savestates ${prefix}/var/lib/smartmontools/smartd. Prefix for smartd state files (implies --enable-savestates) --enable-attributelog --disable-attributelog Enables default smartd attribute log files --with-attributelog ${prefix}/var/lib/smartmontools/attrlog. Prefix for smartd attribute log files (implies --enable-attributelog) Please note that in previous versions of smartmontools (<= 5.39) the default for --with-docdir was ${prefix}/share/doc/smartmontools-VERSION This was changed to make it consistent with the default of the new --docdir option added in autoconf 2.60. The defaults for --with-initscriptdir and --with-systemdsystemunitdir are guessed such that the following rules apply: - If --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc is specified, the guessed directories should be the defaults used by the current OS or distribution. - If --sysconfdir=/etc is NOT specified, the guessed directories should always be below ${prefix} or below ${sysconfdir}. Here's an example: If you set --prefix=/home/joe and none of the other four variables then the different directories that are used would be: --sbindir /home/joe/sbin --docdir /home/joe/share/doc/smartmontools --mandir /home/joe/share/man --sysconfdir /home/joe/etc --with-exampledir /home/joe/share/doc/smartmontools/examplescripts --with-drivedbdir /home/joe/share/smartmontools --with-initscriptdir [see below] --with-systemdsystemunitdir [see below] If systemd is present (and pkg-config reports /lib/systemd/system as the systemdsystemunitdir): --with-initscriptdir [disabled] --with-systemdsystemunitdir /home/joe/lib/systemd/system else if /etc/rc.d/init.d exists: --with-initscriptdir /home/joe/etc/rc.d/init.d --with-systemdsystemunitdir [disabled] else if /etc/init.d exists: --with-initscriptdir /home/joe/etc/init.d --with-systemdsystemunitdir [disabled] else if /etc/rc.d exists: --with-initscriptdir /home/joe/etc/rc.d --with-systemdsystemunitdir [disabled] else --with-initscriptdir [disabled] --with-systemdsystemunitdir [disabled] This is useful for test installs in a harmless subdirectory somewhere. Here are the four possible cases for the four variables above: Case 1: --prefix not set --variable not set ===> VARIABLE gets default value above Case 2: --prefix set --variable not set ===> VARIABLE gets PREFIX/ prepended to default value above Case 3: --prefix not set --variable set ===> VARIABLE gets value that is set Case 4: --prefix is set --variable is set ===> PREFIX is IGNORED, VARIABLE gets value that is set Here are the differences with and without --enable-sample, assuming that initscript location is set and no other options specified (see above for details) Case 1: --enable-sample provided ==> Files installed are: /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/rc.d/init.d/smartd.sample Case 2: --disable-sample provided or parameter left out ==> Files installed are: /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf /usr/local/etc/rc.d/init.d/smartd Additional information about using configure can be found here: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Running-configure-Scripts