If you're installing it on a laptop just to play with it, perhaps https://www.hostedgraphite.com might be useful. The 14 day trial means you can fool around and dump it for self-hosted at the end of it. :)
(My company)
I was installing on a laptop to demo during a conference talk. I also had aspirations of contributing to graphite (something I've so far failed to do.) Having said that, I do know that hosting and maintaining graphite internally is a barrier for some companies. Your product looks like it will fill that need very nicely. Kudos!
Thanks. Yes, for a demo or contributing doing it locally is a good idea. :) Nice set of instructions, it's a bit of a complex beast to install.
Thanks. I wrote a simple Ruby script that will "replay" data as if the event were happening live. It's great for a demo because you can leave it up while your talking and known data is streaming in. And for me it's even better since I was demo-ing a monitoring tool and could have known alert occurring live. :)