Requirements
Weather station
Only Davis Instruments stations are supported. The following stations have been reported to work:
| Station | Releases |
|---|---|
| Weather Monitor II | all releases |
| Vantage Pro | all releases |
| Perception | Lajeado release 0.9.0 and above |
| Wizzard | Lajeado release 0.9.0 and above |
| GroWeather | 0.9.10 and above |
Computer hardware
Generally speaking, meteo is quite lean, at least for current hardware. A raspberry pi works perfectly fine, but note that the frequent database updates would wear out a SD card quite quickly. So if you use such a platform, make sure you have the database on some more robust hardware, I'm currently using a Synology NAS for this purpose.
Disk space: To build meteo on a Linux system, you need at least 150MB of disk space, the installed libraries with debug symbols take about 45MB (they become considerably smaller if you strip them), the installed programms use about 5.5MB. On Solaris, the shared library is smaller, but the archive library is larger. The binaries are linked against the shared libraries by default.
CPU: meteo does not use complicated stuff, so compiling it even on small cpus is fast. Running meteo hardly produces any noticeable load on current hardware. On the meteo exampe server, meteo's activities account for less than than about 0.3% of the CPU load. The most important portion of CPU load comes from the database.
Database space: The most important requirement for meteo is database space. A VantagePro Plus station uses about 970kB in the sdata and avg per day of database space, or about 343MB per year. On october 30th, 2003, the database on the meteo website was about 1.4GB in size and contained more than 47mio rows in the large tables, more than 30mio rows in the sdata table alone.
Software
Most parts of meteo are written in C++. You'll need a current version of the GNU C++ compiler g++ to compile it. Please note that at least on Solaris, you should not try to use a g++ that uses the native assembler and linker, as this combination will trigger a bug that causes meteopoll to terminate prematurely. Do yourself a favor and use g++ 3.3 with the GNU assembler and linker.
On some plattforms, libtool's support is rather new, and not always reliable.
In particular, you should use --disable-shared on Mac OS X.
meteo needs the following additional packages to build:
- mysql
- If not installed yet on your system, get a copy from the MySQL website. The system running the meteo software needs only the client libraries, but to compile, you'll need the headers also. The MySQL server does not need to run on the same machine.
- libxml2
- Libxml2 is used to parse the configuration file and to provide access to its contents.
- libpng
- The meteodraw program always creates PNG images. The GD2 library (see below needs libpng to encode such images. Note the libpng depends on zlib.
- GD2
- Thomas Boutell's GD library is used to draw the graphs.
- gettext
- The localization of the meteobrowser is done using gettext. If you want to change the translations, you will need gettext.