Install Firesheep on Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10

This morning I had a little bit of free time so I thought I’d (finally) check out the Firefox extension Firesheep. The main website mentions that it isn’t supported for Linux, but the source code is available and as it turns out very easy to compile. Below are instructions for downloading, compiling and installing the Firesheep security plugin for Firefox.

Get the Source

You’ll need to download the source code from github, which can be done using the following two commands:

git clone https://github.com/codebutler/firesheep.git
cd firesheep
git submodule update --init

These two commands will download the code required to compile Firesheep, putting the source into a new directory called “firesheep”.

Build Tools

To compile Firesheep on Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 you’ll need the following development packages installed. Simply copy-paste the following list of packages into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install autoconf libtool libpcap-dev libboost-all-dev libhal-dev xulrunner-1.9.2-dev

On my machine this installed quite a few packages, and while the main Firesheep website lists 10.10 specifically, I had no problems on my 10.04 installation.

Build Firesheep

You’re now ready to compile Firesheep. Run the following command and hopefully you’ll be able to build it without error:

./autogen.sh && make

Install the Plugin

If all is well you should find a new file called ‘firesheep.xpi’ in a subdirectory called build (ie; firesheep/build/). Simply drag-and-drop that file into your Addons dialog box, restart Firefox and you should be set.

I’ve been having some issues in actually capturing data on my Dell D630 with an Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG card. It looks like this tool is often hardware specific, so your mileage may vary. I’d be interested in anyone offering suggestions on getting it to capture properly on OS X 10.6 (macbook) or Ubuntu 10.04+.