After you've installed Wireshark on your computer, the only thing to do will be to start the analyzer from the desktop, program files, or the quick start bar.
To keep consistency, this book is written for Wireshark version 2.0.2 from February 2016. In general (but not always), if you look at the version number X Y Z, when the X changes it will be a major release (like version 2), that changes every several years and occur the software completely. When the Y changes, it will usually be additional features or significant changes in some features, and if the Z changes, it will usually be bug fixes and new protocol dissectors. Since new minor releases are released usually every few weeks, you can have a quick look at their release notes.
When you do so, the following window will be opened (version 2.0.2):
In the start window, you will see the following sections:
- The main menu, with file, edit and view operations, capture, statistics, and various tools.
- The main toolbar that provides quick access to frequently used items from the menu.
- The filter toolbar, it provides access to the display filters.
In the main area of the start window, we have the following items:
- A list of files that were recently opened
- A Capture part that enables us to configure a capture filter and shows us the traffic on our computer interfaces
Seeing traffic on computer interfaces is a nice improvement from version 1, as it enables us to quickly see the active interfaces and start the capture on them.
- The Learn part can take us directly to the manual pages