User Guide

Introduction

• Ethernet: Any card supported by Windows should work. See the wiki pages on Ethernet capture and

offloading for issues that may affect your environment.

• 802.11: See the Wireshark wiki page. Capturing raw 802.11 information may be difficult without

special equipment.

• Other media: See http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/NetworkMedia

Remarks:

• Many older Windows versions are no longer supported for three reasons: None of the developers use

those systems which makes support difficult. The libraries Wireshark depends on (GTK, WinPcap, …)

have dropped support for older releases. Microsoft has also dropped support for these systems.

• Windows 95, 98 and ME are no longer supported. The "old technology" releases of Windows lack

memory protection (specifically VirutalProtect) which we use to improve program safety and security.

The last known version to work was Ethereal 0.99.0 (which includes WinPcap 3.1). You can get it from

http://ethereal.com/download.html. According to this bug report, you may need to install Ethereal 0.10.0

on some systems. Microsoft retired support for Windows 98 and ME in 2006.

• Windows NT 4.0 no longer works with Wireshark. The last known version to work was Wireshark

0.99.4 (which includes WinPcap 3.1). You still can get it from http://www.wireshark.org/download/

win32/all-versions/wireshark-setup-0.99.4.exe. Microsoft retired support for Windows NT 4.0 in 2004.

• Windows 2000 no longer works with Wireshark. The last known version to work was Wireshark 1.2.x

(which includes WinPcap 4.1.2). You still can get it from http://www.wireshark.org/download/win32/

all-versions/. Microsoft retired support for Windows 2000 in 2010.

• Windows CE and the embedded versions of Windows are not currently supported.

• Multiple monitor setups are supported but may behave a bit strangely.

1.2.3. Unix / Linux

Wireshark currently runs on most UNIX platforms. The system requirements should be comparable to the

Windows values listed above.

Binary packages are available for at least the following platforms:

• Apple Mac OS X

• Debian GNU/Linux

• FreeBSD

• Gentoo Linux

• HP-UX

• Mandriva Linux

• NetBSD

• OpenPKG

• Red Hat Fedora/Enterprise Linux

• rPath Linux