Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Windows ME?

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001 13:25:07 -0800 (PST)
> Does Ethereal work under Windows ME?

There are two parts to that question:

	1) does Ethereal work at all on Windows ME?

and

	2) if it works at all, does it support capturing packets on
	   Windows ME?

I suspect the answer to the first question is "yes", but you'd have to
try it to find out, or get a reply from somebody who has WME and has
tried it.

If the answer to the first question is "yes", the answer to the second
question may well be "no" - and, in fact, from previous mail from the
WinPcap folk, I infer that it probably will *not* work on Windows ME, as
the code on which Ethereal relies to do the capturing doesn't work, in
the current release of that code, on Windows ME.

I.e., whether Ethereal can capture packets depends very little on
Ethereal and a lot on the libpcap library running on the OS you're
using; if libpcap doesn't support packet capture, there's nothing
Ethereal can do about it.

WinPcap is the port of libpcap to Windows; 2.02, as I remember from the
mail to which I'm referring, doesn't support Windows ME, but the 2.1
version, when it comes out, might.

(If you want to use the 2.1 beta version of WinPcap, you'll probably
have to get the source to Ethereal and recompile it with the 2.1 version
of WinPcap, which means you'd have to download the "developer's pack" of
WinPcap - and it also means you'd have to have a compiler capable of
compiling Ethereal, e.g.  Microsoft Visual C++.

As 2.1 is still a beta version, we're not going to make the official
distributions of Ethereal use it yet.)