Chapter 2. Building and Installing Ethereal

For other versions of UNIX, You will want to use the following commands:

gzip -d ethereal-0.8.19-tar.gz tar xvf ethereal-0.8.19-tar

Note!: The pipeline gzip -dc ethereal-0.8.19-tar.gz | tar xvf - will work here as well.

Note!: If you have downloaded the Ethereal tarball under Windows, you may find that your browser has created a file with underscores rather than periods in its file name.

2.Change directory to the ethereal source directory.

3.Configure your source so it will build correctly for your version of UNIX. You can do this with the following command:

./configure

If this step fails, you will have to rectify the problems and rerun configure. Troubleshooting hints are provided in the section called Troubleshooting during the install.

4.Build the sources into a binary, with the make command. For example: make

5.Install the software in its final destination, using the command:

make install

Once you have installed Ethereal with make install above, you should be able to run it by entering ethereal.

Installing the binaries under UNIX

In general, installing the binary under your version of UNIX will be specific to the installation methods used with your version of UNIX. For example, under AIX, you would use smit to install the Ethereal binary package, while under Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX) you would use setld.

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Chapter 2. Building and Installing Ethereal

Installing from RPMs under Linux

Use the following command to install the Ethereal RPM that you have downloaded from the Ethereal web site:

rpm -ivh ethereal-0.8.10-1.i386.rpm

If the above step fails because of missing dependencies, install the dependencies first, and then retry the step above. See Example 2-4 for information on what RPMs you will need to have installed.

Installing from debs under Debian

Use the following command to install Ethereal under Debian:

apt-get install ethereal

apt-get should take care of all of the dependency issues for you.

Building from source under Windows

Unfortunately the current revisor of this document has never built Ethereal under Windows and is thus not competent to write this section. Hopefully this will be remedied in the future.

Installing Ethereal under Windows

In this section we explore installing Ethereal under Windows from the binary packages. You must follow two steps:

1.Install WinPcap. There are instructions at the WinPcap web site for installing it under Windows 9X, Windows NT and Windows 2000. These are located at: http://netgroup-serv.polito.it/winpcap/install/Default.htm 5.

2.Install Ethereal. You may acquire a binary installable of Ethereal at http://www.ethereal.com/download.html#binaries 6. Download the installer

( after installing WinPcap ) and execute it.

Troubleshooting during the install

A number of errors can occur during the installation process. Some hints on solving these are provided here.

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Chapter 2. Building and Installing Ethereal

If the configure stage fails, you will need to find out why. You can check the file config.log in the source directory to find out what failed. The last few lines of this file should help in determining the problems.

The standard problems are that you do not have GTK+ on your system, or you do not have a recent enough version of GTK+. The configure will also fail if you do not have libpcap (at least the required include files) on your system.

Another common problem is for the final compile and link stage to terminate with a complaint of: Output to long. This is likely being caused by an antiquated sed ( like that shipped with Solaris ). Since sed is used by the libtool script to construct the final link command, this leads to mysterious problems. This can be resolved by downloading sed from http://www.gnu.org/directory/sed.html 7.

If you cannot determine what the problems are, send mail to the ethereal-dev mailing list explaining your problem, and including the output from config.log and anything else you think is relevant, like a trace of the make stage.

Notes

1.http://www.ethereal.com

2.http://www.gtk.org

3.http://www.tcpdump.org

4.http://www.tcpdump.org

5.http://netgroup-serv.polito.it/winpcap/install/Default.htm

6.http://www.ethereal.com/download.html#binaries

7.http://www.gnu.org/directory/sed.html

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