Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Installing Insight Debugger on Ubuntu 12.04

Hello World,

I find GDB to be great debugging tool. I was using GDB while working on a buffer overflow exploit and I needed to see the contents of the stack and registers. I realized that a graphical interface would make GDB even more useful. I found a very useful tool - Insight which allows us to see the contents of the stack and registers in an very intuitive way.



However it turns out that Insight has been removed from Ubuntu Packages so you cannot install it directly using a simple command.

I tried downloading the source code for the latest version from the website but the insight-6.8-1a.tar.bz2 file was corrupted every time I downloaded it. So, I tried downloading the older version 6.7 but I had troubles compiling it. 

Finally, I managed to install it with an easier method and I would like to share it with you all.

1.  Navigate to the folder /etc/apt

2. Open the file etc/apt/sources.list using the following command

    sudo gedit sources.list

3.  Add the following lines at the end of the file and save it.

    deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/dev/ubuntu natty main
    deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/dev/ubuntu natty main

4.  Now update your apt sources using

    sudo apt-get update

5. Finally, install Insight using

    sudo apt-get install insight

6. Launch Insight using the command

    insight

Please let me know if this doesn't work anymore!

Thanks
Vinay