Live capture support under Ethereal depends on many things including the particular hardware you're using, your operating system, the version of libpcap/WinPcap that you have installed, and the drivers you're using. The table below is an attempt to sort out what configurations work on each system. Please send updates to ethereal-web[AT]ethereal.com .
| 802.11 | ATM | Ethernet | FDDI | Frame Relay | Loopback | Serial | Token Ring | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIX | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown | Yes |
| FreeBSD | Yes1 | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Yes |
| HP-UX | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | No | No | Unknown | Unknown |
| Irix | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | No | Unknown | Unknown | No |
| Linux | Yes2 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes3 | Yes | Yes4 | Yes |
| Mac OS X | Yes5 | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes6 | No |
| NetBSD | Yes | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Yes |
| OpenBSD | Yes | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | Yes |
| Solaris | Unknown | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| Tru64 UNIX | Unknown | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | No | Yes | Unknown | Unknown |
| Windows | Yes7 | Unknown | Yes | Unknown | No | N/A8 | Yes9 | Yes |
Serial support refers to PPP (and possibly HDLC) framed captures only. SLIP and non-networked connections are not supported.
Loopback support refers to UNIX-style loopback devices, which are software-only network interfaces used in most UNIX systems to handle packets sent from a machine to itself, either by sending to its own IP address or to a loopback IP address such as 127.0.0.1.
[1] See the FAQ for more details.