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Building Wireshark Fedora pcap.h issue

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I am trying to build Wireshark 1.6 on Fedora 14 x64. When I run the ./configure script I get the following error:

configure: error: Header file pcap.h not found; if you installed libpcap from source, did you also do "make install-incl", and if you installed a binary package of libpcap, is there also a developer's package of libpcap, and did you also install that package?

I found the following in the FAQ:

Q 4.1: I have libpcap installed; why did the configure script not find pcap.h or bpf.h?

A: Are you sure pcap.h and bpf.h are installed? The official distribution of libpcap only installs the libpcap.a library file when "make install" is run. To install pcap.h and bpf.h, you must run "make install-incl". If you're running Debian or Redhat, make sure you have the "libpcap-dev" or "libpcap-devel" packages installed. It's also possible that pcap.h and bpf.h have been installed in a strange location. If this is the case, you may have to tweak aclocal.m4.

I have downloaded libpcap-1.1.1 but the Makefile does not seem to have a "install-incl" target. Also, libpcap.x86_64 is installed from the fedora repository. There is no package named "libpcap-dev in the Fedora repository. What should I do next?

asked 15 Jun '11, 10:43

irarcher's gravatar image

irarcher
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accept rate: 0%


One Answer:

2

Redhat generally has a package named "libpcap-devel" (but not one called "libpcap-dev"). Did you try with that name?

answered 15 Jun '11, 12:19

JeffMorriss's gravatar image

JeffMorriss ♦
6.2k572
accept rate: 27%

Yes, I tried both names.

(16 Jun '11, 08:07) irarcher

Argh, that's annoying. It looks like they forgot libpcap-devel. The package is in updates/testing, though, so I guess they realized their mistake(?). Fedora 15 appears to have the same problem, but libpcap-devel has not yet made even to updates/testing.

For now, it looks like you can pick up the not-done-testing-yet update. Or find the right target to install the header files from the libpcap source. It might be worth opening a bug with Redhat too (I can't find one about it).

(16 Jun '11, 08:40) JeffMorriss ♦

OK, I filed a Redhat bug on the topic.

(16 Jun '11, 09:15) JeffMorriss ♦

The Redhat bug is closed--looks like the problem I found was a bad mirror which was missing the libpcap-devel package. I don't know if your system is being unfortunate and picking the same mirror or if multiple mirrors have the problem or what, but libpcap-devel is part of the base OS for both Fedora 14 and 15 (see the URL to the master mirror in the bug report).

(16 Jun '11, 11:10) JeffMorriss ♦

Thanks Jeff. I'm actually working on an isolated network, and I was using the packages on the Fedora 14 DVD (which does not contain libpcap-devel). Also I realized that I needed to select the "Everything" directory instead of the "Fedora" directory to find this package (from http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/14/).

(16 Jun '11, 15:19) irarcher