The recent release of Ghidra 11.0 caught my eye and I wanted to give it a spin again after a distasteful first experience of using it in 2020.I am sharing these installtion notes to help those who find Ghidra’s no-installer no-shortcut approach rather tedious.

Installing Ghidra

Nothing much in this section, the docs cover it well. You need jdk 17 to run Ghidra. Simple command gets the job done:

apt install -y openjdk-17-jdk

Setting up App Shortcut

As you must know by now, to run Ghidra you’ll have to manually execute the script inside the folder. That’s quite tedious and unintuitive. Here’s a workaround to add a desktop shortcut + add Ghidra to the app drawer (the thing that pops up on pressing Super key) and pin it to dock.

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Move the Ghidra installation folder wherever you wish. I moved it to /opt/.
  3. cd into Desktop directory and create a new Desktop entry file:
    cd Desktop
touch Ghidra.desktop
  4. Download this file with wget https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/files/3853902/ghidra_ico.zip and place it inside the <ghidra_dir>/support/.
  5. Add these lines inside the Ghidra.desktop file:
    [Desktop Entry]
Categories=Application;Development;
Comment=Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering Suite
Exec=/opt/ghidra/ghidraRun
GenericName=Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering Suite
Icon=/opt/ghidra/support/ghidra.ico
MimeType=
Name=Ghidra
Path=/opt/ghidra
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
Version=11.0
  6. Move the file into /usr/share/ubuntu/applications/
  7. Logout
  8. ???
  9. Success

That’s all for this short blog. I’ll post more in future with tips and other notes on using Ghidra as my primary SRE framework.