3.3. Win32: Automated library download

[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.

[Warning]Warning!

The library zip files on the server and in the setup target will match only for the latest sources, as old zip files will be moved into the old folder on the server. So you cannot use the setup target for "old" (this may even include the released) sources!

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

Before you start the download, you must have installed both the required tools (see Chapter 2, Tools) and also the Ethereal sources (see Section 4.4, “Obtain the Ethereal sources”).

By default the libraries will be downloaded and installed into C:\ethereal-win32-libs. You can change this to any other location by editing the file config.nmake and changing the line containing the ETHEREAL_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 Ethereal, as described already in Section 2.19, “Win32: Verify installed tools”.

Then it will download the zipped libraries into the directory specified by ETHEREAL_LIBS and install (unzip) all required library files there.

If you have problems downloading the library files, see the wget proxy comment in Section 2.16, “Win32: GNU wget (optional)”.

3.3.1. 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As new versions of the libraries become available, maybe with bugfixes or some new functionality, your libraries get outdated.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 ETHEREAL_LIBS dir and call the setup target again, but that would require to download every file again (currently about 33MB), which isn't necessary.

The following will bring your libraries up to date:

  • Update your Ethereal sources to the latest SVN files (see Section 4.4, “Obtain the Ethereal sources”), so the zip filenames in the setup target of Makefile.nmake is in sync with the library zip files on the server.

  • Remove all files previously unzipped from the downloaded files in your ETHEREAL_LIBS library path (all the subdirs, e.g. c:\ethereal_libs\gtk+), except for the zip files located at the toplevel, which are the files downloaded the last time(s). You could do this, be entering at the command line:

    > nmake -f Makefile.nmake clean_setup

  • Start the setup target described above. As wget will download only the missing files, existing zip files in the ETHEREAL_LIBS dir won't be downloaded again. Outdated zip files shouldn't do any harm.