wireshark installation

Question

i downloaded wireshark-1.8.0rc2.tar.bz2 and copied it to /opt/wireshark directory and uncompressed it by

sudo tar -xjvf wireshark-1.8.0rc2.tar.bz2

then by doing ls in the extracted folder, i found the configure file.

Then i did ./configure then i got this problem:

  configure: error: I couldn't find yacc (or bison or ...); 
    make sure it's installed and in your path.

how to fix it?

Answer 1

In case someone runs into this in the future: you can just sudo apt-get install bison

Bison will provide yacc to Wireshark via update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/bison.yacc to provide /usr/bin/yacc (yacc) in auto mode

Also, if you install Bison, you'll also need sudo apt-get install flex since it will ask for it afterwards. And while you're at it, you should sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev too, since it will probably need pcap.h, and it comes in the -dev package, not the regular one.

After this, it should be the usual make, wait... and then make install and you're done. Depending on your specs, the wait part might be 5 minutes, just to build the parlay package.

Answer 2

Wireshark is available in the software repositories. Try running sudo apt-get install wireshark in the terminal (ctrl+alt+t) to install it with the dependencies you were missing. Although, you might need to enable the universe repositories.

Question for you though... Is there a specific reason you're trying to build from source ?