Introduction

As with all things, there must be a beginning, and so it is with Ethereal. To use Ethereal, you must:

• Obtain a binary package for your operating system, or

• Obtain the source and build Ethereal for your operating system.

Currently, only two or three Linux Distributions ship ethereal, and they are commonly shipping an out-of-date version. No other versions of UNIX ship Ethereal so far, and Microsoft does not ship it with any version of Windows. For that reason, you will need to know where to get the latest version of Ethereal and how to install it. The current version of Ethereal is 0.8.19.

This chapter shows you how to obtain source and binary packages, and how to build Ethereal from source, should you choose to do so.

The following are the general steps you would use:

1. Download the relevant package for your needs, eg, source or binary distribution.

2. Build the source into a binary, if you have downloaded the source

   This may involve building and/or installing any other necessary packages.

3. Install the binaries in their final destinations.