Install WhatPulse in Ubuntu and Debian

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Introduction

In this guide, I will be showing you how you can install get WhatPulse setup on Ubuntu and Debian. This will start by getting all of the required software installed, installing WhatPulse and setting up all of the correct permissions.

Prerequisites

In order to follow this tutorial, you will need the following

System Preparation

Updating package list

The first step is to open the terminal window and update our list of packages. This will allow us to install the most up to date version of everything. To do this, you will need to open up a terminal window.
When you have the terminal window open, you can then run the following command:

sudo apt-get update;

Installing Prerequisites

Before we can install WhatPulse, we will first need to install the prerequisites to make sure that the program functions correctly. You can install these packages by doing this command in the terminal

sudo apt-get install libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-sqlite libssl-dev libqtscript4-sql libqtscript4-core libpcap0.8 -y

Installing WhatPulse

After you have installed all of the required packages, you can now install WhatPulse. You can get this by going to WhatPulse Downloads and downloading the Ubuntu-based version. Once you have downloaded this, if you go back into the terminal and change to wherever it downloaded e.g. Downloads.

cd ~/Downloads/

We are then going to extract this to a folder which we will use to store our programs

mkdir -p ~/Programs/whatpulse
gzip -dc whatpulse-linux*.tar.gz | tar -C ~/Programs/whatpulse -xvzf -

You should now change to the Programs directory

cd ~/Programs/whatpulse

Once you have done this, you now need to run the setup input permissions script

sudo ./setup-input-permissions.sh

Just follow the instructions until it says All done, have fun using WhatPulse! If you would like WhatPulse to count data usage, you will need to run this file

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip ./whatpulse

After this, you can start WhatPulse by typing

./whatpulse

You can now just login and use WhatPulse as normal.

Making WhatPulse run on Startup (Ubuntu)

If you would like WhatPulse to run when you start your machine up, you can easily do this by following these steps. The first thing you will need to do is to search for the Startup Applications in the start menu

Once this opens up, you simply click Add and filling out each of the boxes. For the command, you can just click browse and go to the programs directory we created and click on whatpulse.

You can then click add to complete this.

Making WhatPulse run on Startup (Debian)

To get whatpulse to automatically start up when you login on Debian, you will need to head to your terminal and paste in the following

mkdir ~/.config/autostart;
echo -e "
[Desktop Entry]
Name=WhatPulse
Comment=Autostart whatpulse at login
Exec=/home/wilson18/Programs/whatpulse/whatpulse -delaystartup
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=whatpulse
StartupNotify=false" | tee -a ~/.config/autostart/whatpulse.desktop

Reboot

If you restart, you should see whatpulse ready for you when you login!