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Installing Wireshark – Muddled Alternatives

You might have had some problems with Wireshark installations recently, I certainly have!

After installing and removing the Wireshark files from the repository, I ended up with the error message below when re-installing.

warning: %postun(wireshark-qt-2.6.4-1.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 2
Non-fatal POSTUN scriptlet failure in rpm package wireshark-qt-2.6.4-1.x86_64

Apparently the file that stores the alternatives for command aliasing might have been corrupted. So let’s remove everything we’ve got, and see what’s left.

yum remove wireshark wireshark-qt

Now we’ve removed the current wireshark RPM files, let’s have a look at the alternative aliases we’ve got left on the system.

alternatives --display wireshark
wireshark - status is auto.
link currently points to /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt
/usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt - priority 50
Current `best' version is /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt

So the system thinks there is a wireshark available to run, using the wireshark-qt version. But we’ve removed them in the step before. Let’s just validate that.

# which wireshark
/usr/bin/which: no wireshark in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/home/publisher/.local/bin:/home/publisher/bin)

# which wireshark-qt
/usr/bin/which: no wireshark-qt in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/home/publisher/.local/bin:/home/publisher/bin)

No wireshark, or wireshark-qt files exist in the path. So this could be why we have the problem. Let’s fix it by forcibly removing the wrong value, and then re-install everything and see if that fixes things.

sudo alternatives --remove wireshark /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt

yum install wireshark wireshark-qt

alternatives --display wireshark
wireshark - status is auto.
link currently points to /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt
/usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt - priority 50
Current `best' version is /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt

Which looks the same as before, and indeed it is, but this time we have a wireshark-qt file installed on the system.

$ which wireshark
/usr/bin/wireshark
$ which wireshark-qt
/usr/bin/wireshark-qt

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