A new stable release of Wireshark, the nifty network sniffing tool, is now available for download.

You may recall the app from the Ubuntu “Spyware” saga. Wireshark was among the tools used to inspect packets/searches travelling from the Unity Dash and back.

Whether you’re trying to track down a network issue or just curious about what the apps you use are sending, and to whom, Wireshark is the tool most people turn to.

Wireshark 2.2 features a bunch of stuff that flies straight over my head a healthy set of new and improved features, bug fixes, and the like.

‘Decode As’ support, mimics TShark functionality

Packets can be exported as JSON

Packet bytes can be displayed as EBCDIC

Conversations, Endpoints dialogs more responsive when viewing large numbers of items

RTP player now allows up to 30 minutes of silence frames.

proto_tree_add_checksum was added as an API

New File format decoding

Improved protocol support

Getting Wireshark 2.2

Ubuntu offers an older stable releases of the network protocol analyzer in its archives. This can be installed using the Ubuntu Software tool.

Download links for the latest stable release, as well as more information on this release, can be found on the Wireshark.org website.

Wireshark PPA

This latest stable release should appear in the official Wireshark developer’s PPA. To add this to Ubuntu’s Software Sources run the command below in a new Terminal window:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wireshark-dev/stable