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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon NationalSecurityAgency

Ghidra Installation on Ubuntu 22.04.3 is totally confusing

Open vimleshkumarkanaujiya opened this issue 1 year ago • 6 comments

  1. I downloaded the release edition from Github.
  2. Unzipped the source.tar.gz.
  3. cd ghidra-Ghidra_10.4_build/Ghidra/RuntimeScripts/Linux
  4. ./ghidraRun
  5. But it isn't working and shows following.
  6. Cannot launch from repo because Ghidra has not been compiled with Eclipse or Gradle.

vimleshkumarkanaujiya avatar Oct 09 '23 20:10 vimleshkumarkanaujiya

Just to clarify, you downloaded the link labelled "Source code (tar.gz)" but not link labelled "ghidra_10.4_PUBLIC_20230928.zip"? If so, you probably (?) should have used the other link:

[https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases/download/Ghidra_10.4_build/ghidra_10.4_PUBLIC_20230928.zip]

The second two links in each release block are really archives of the source code, i.e. C and Java files, not executables, and cannot be launched without first using, well, gradle or Eclipse to compile them.

d-millar avatar Oct 09 '23 21:10 d-millar

Closing, as @d-millar has provided the correct explanation for your issue.

ryanmkurtz avatar Oct 10 '23 10:10 ryanmkurtz

Thank you people 💯

vimleshkumarkanaujiya avatar Oct 10 '23 20:10 vimleshkumarkanaujiya

It would be really helpful it it was made crystal clear in the installation instructions (both README.md and in the htmlversion https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/stable/GhidraDocs/InstallationGuide.html) that when you say "Download a Ghidra release file", you mean specifically the ghidra_10.4_PUBLIC_20230928.zip and NOT any of the tar.gz files.

It gets confusing because we read the InstallationGuide.html, where it talks about native binaries, which makes us think "oh that zip file is the windows version" and then we download the tar.gz and end up wasting time.

Summary: Please be super clear everywhere that the ghidra_10.4_PUBLIC_20230928.zip file is the installation file both for linux and windows. Best if it can be noted also on the download page itself.

reikred avatar Dec 02 '23 00:12 reikred

Yes, I was confused because tar file type predates zip file type. Mostly Unix based system use tar.* and Microsoft uses zip. tar deals with file ownership, permissions, links, special files and zip is a compressing archiver works very with windows but can not deal with file permissions.

vimleshkumarkanaujiya avatar Dec 04 '23 15:12 vimleshkumarkanaujiya

GitHub automatically sticks those archived source downloads there...I wish they would isolate them a little better.

ryanmkurtz avatar Dec 04 '23 16:12 ryanmkurtz