[X-Unix] ethereal for MacOSX

[Ken Rossman]

On Monday, February 2, 2004, at 11:39 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
> Hi Ken! Well, it just so happens that Fink's alternative, DarwinPorts,
> also offers ethereal for Mac OS X.

Thanks, Juan, for first of all mentioning a "fink alternative", which I 
had
not previously been aware of.  I will look into DarwinPorts.

> In any case, as far as I can see, ethereal compiles from source cleanly
> on Mac OS X, without the need of any patch (I've done this with the 
> 0.9.14
> release).

I tried that, but found it was asking for glib (and who knows what 
other ones
I haven't yet found out about that are missing).  The more things I have
to pile on my OSX systems that didn't already come with it, the more 
nervous
I get about breaking something else in the future.  Hmmm...

> But if you can't be bothered to do that I'd advise you to surf over to
> http://darwinports.opendarwin.org and join the project.

The idea case would be "I can't be bothered with compiling source, and 
would
rather just run prebuilt binaries", and sometime that's the case.  I'd 
like
to be able to go either way, though.

> It might be a bit of a nuisance at first because you have to fetch it
> over CVS...

Don't even know what this is, sorry... :)

> ...but once everything is in place it pays for itself.  I'm an active
> DarwinPorts user and "contributor wannabe" and am well satisfied with
> what it offers.

I, too, think of myself as a "contributor wannabe", though I have done
little to enhance my status with regard to that title.  I'd love to see 
a
lot more X-based apps ported to native Darwin format, as I feel 
X-Windows
apps were good for a certain time, but they are outliving their 
usefulness
in today's world.  Too topheavy, too ugly, too prone to unnecessary 
failures.

> With just one command I can have ethereal, nmap, dsniff and around 900
> other software titles fetched, configured, compiled and installed.

Excellent.  I'll definitely check it out.

> Regarding ethereal specifically, I've been known among DarwinPorts 
> developers
> to be quite whimsical about it, hehe! (mainly because I dislike 
> tcpdump).

(I'm with you there)

> Upon my constant requests a no-X11 build variant was included to the 
> port
> (meaning that only tethereal, the command line utility, and not 
> ethereal,
> the GUI, gets built).

I would add to that request a request to split out the packet capture
facility of ethereal (or any other net snooper for that matter) into a
separate, command-line utility, so one could script packet captures,
for later analysis by a more GUI-oriented too.  Perhaps this also 
already
exists (for OSX and others?)

> The release version was also upped to 0.9.16 and then to 0.10.0a,
> but unfortunately that last one is severely broken.

Maybe that's part of my problem then.  I tried finking down the very
latest version of ethereal, which I believe was 0.10.0a.  I should back
up, I guess, to an earlier version (0.9.something, I guess).

Thanks for all the great info!

KR

Ken Rossman
rossman at columbia.edu
G3 iBook/600MHz/640MB/10.2.8
G4 tower/400MHz/512MB/10.2.8