5.3. Win32: Automated library download

5.3.1. Initial download

You can download/install all required libraries by using the setup target of the Makefile.nmake from the source package.

[Tip]Tip!

It's a really good idea to use the Win32 automated library download to install the required libraries as it makes this download very easy.

[Note]Note!

Before you start the download, you must have installed both the required tools (see Chapter 4, Tool Reference) and also the Wireshark sources (see Section 3.3, “Obtain the Wireshark sources”).

By default the libraries will be downloaded and installed into C:\wireshark-win32-libs. You can change this to any other location by editing the file config.nmake and changing the line containing the WIRESHARK_LIBS setting to your favourite place (use an absolute path here).

Then enter at the command line:

> nmake -f Makefile.nmake setup

This will first check for all the various tools needed to build Wireshark, as described already in Section 2.2.7, “Verify installed tools”.

Then it will download the zipped libraries (together around 30MB!) from the server location at: http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark-win32-libs/trunk/packages/ into the directory specified by WIRESHARK_LIBS and install (unzip) all required library files there.

If you have problems downloading the library files, you might be connected to the internet through a proxy/firewall. In this case see the wget proxy comment in Section 4.15, “Win32: GNU wget (optional)”.

5.3.2. Update of a previous download

As new versions of the libraries become available, maybe with bugfixes or some new functionality, your libraries get outdated.

You could simply remove everything in the WIRESHARK_LIBS dir and call the setup target again, but that would require a download of every file again, which isn't necessary.

The following will bring your libraries up to date:

  • Update your Wireshark sources to the latest SVN files (see Section 3.3, “Obtain the Wireshark sources”), so the zip filenames in the setup target of Makefile.nmake are in sync with the library zip files on the server.

  • Execute the library setup command as described above.

    > nmake -f Makefile.nmake setup

    Note that this command will automatically do a clean-setup which will remove all files previously unzipped from the downloaded files in your WIRESHARK_LIBS library path (all the subdirs, e.g. c:\wireshark-win32-libs\gtk+), except for the zip files located at the toplevel, which are the files downloaded the last time(s).

    Also note that as wget will download only the missing (updated) files, existing zip files in the WIRESHARK_LIBS dir won't be downloaded again. Remaining (outdated) zip files shouldn't do any harm.