Differences between source and APT/yum installations

The main difference between installing Cacti from source and using apt/yum-based installations is the location of the configuration files and availability of patches. Cacti, by default, does not follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) defined for Linux operating systems. The FHS defines directories where applications should add their configuration or log files. The apt/yum-based installations usually follow this standard. Due to this, add-ons such as the plugin architecture may not be available on all platforms using apt/yum.

The main advantage of using apt/yum based installations is the ease of installation, but as we've just seen, installing Cacti isn't very difficult.

However, the disadvantage of using apt or yum is the availability of newer Cacti versions. Source-based Cacti installations can be upgraded to the latest version as soon as they are available on the Cacti website, while apt/yum-based installs might need to wait until the package maintainers update their repositories.