How to Install and Use Wireshark on Ubuntu Linux?

Last Updated : 08 Jul, 2022

Wireshark is an open-source network protocol analyzer that helps us to see what is happening inside a network when we try to communicate with other networks. Currently, Wireshark is the most famous application to analyze networks. To know more about Wireshark please refer to the article Introduction to Wireshark.

Steps to Install Wireshark on Ubuntu Linux:

To install the latest version of Wireshark on Ubuntu we have to follow certain steps:

Step 1: Go to the terminal by simply pressing Ctrl + Alt + t or right-click + Open in Terminal

Step 2: Add a repository by running this command,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wireshark-dev/stable

Step 3: Update the repository

sudo apt update

Step 4: Install Wireshark

sudo apt install wireshark

Step 5: Wireshark is installed, you can run in the terminal to do so run this command

sudo wireshark

or just simply go to show applications and run Wireshark.

You can check the version of your installed Wireshark by running the following command

apt show wireshark

If you face any error during installation or running Wireshark like Wireshark xdg_runtime_dir not set then open the terminal and run this command and click YES to the message box

sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common

After opening Wireshark if you can see wavy lines beside enp0s3 then congratulations, you are all set and good to go.

How to Use Wireshark:

To capture the networking packages using Wireshark follow these steps

Step 1: Go to Wireshark and double click on the first option enp0s3 to start capturing

Step 2: You can see a window with various source and destination IP addresses, protocols, lengths, etc. This is where you are capturing the protocols. The Protocol is showing currently which network protocol is running on your system and their source and destination IP addresses. You can also apply filters by protocol names to see only the packets you want to see.

Step 3: After capturing all the required packets that you want you can stop by simply clicking the red square button at the top-left. To start capturing again just click the blue button beside the red stop button.