When you install a Linux distribution such as Red Hat, the following performance tools are normally installed by default:

Ps - which can produce the same format of output data as other UNIX's

Process accounting - (the data capture mechanism to produce the pacct file including the accton command is normally there although the acctcom utility to process the output is not; commands such as sa are available instead). If process accounting is not installed (the default with the Suse 7 distribution), then you will need to install the acct package.

Vmstat - If you also want to be able to use the sar command, then a very useful package to install is sysstat. This is available for download from the following URL:

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/

Sysstat provides commands such as sar and mpstat. The sar works best on the Linux 2.4 kernel (for reporting on multiple disk drives using the sar -d option), but runs fine also on 2.2 kernels.

At Metron we have successfully run sysstat and the other utilities described on several Linux distributions including Red Hat 6.2, Suse 7, Caldera OpenLinux eServer 2.3 and Turbolinux 6 using both 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.