Kushal Koolwal’s Debian Linux Blogs

Recently I was going through my Newsforge feeds and I noticed an excellent article about a utility called “fio”. It is a disk performance checking utility - a better alternative to the good old “hdparm” utility.

My only issue was that there was no native package for the Debian repository. And I wanted to install one on my Debian (Lenny/testing) system. Therefore I decided to create a “.deb” package for the fio using checkinstall. Note that I had to use “checkinstall” instead of “debuild” because fio is not a native Debian package as I mentioned before. So I had to download the fio source and then create a Debian Binary package for fio on my Debian system.

I thought that people who also want to install fio on their Debian system can utilize the package that I created. This will save them the trouble of going through the process of making binary package although I have to say that it is not an overly complicated process.

You can download the file here.

Also I high recommend you to read README and HOWTO file that comes with the source. They are very comprehensive - very few ones are that great.

Update: Based on a feedback from one of the users, it seems that you will need to install libaio1 package (shared library) before you can install the FIO package. You can do this by:

# apt-get install libaio1

and then

# dpkg -i fio_1.19-etch-build-1_i386.deb

Enjoy the utility!

As usual, please leave a comment/feedback, if you have any.