Introduction
Getting current versions
Often distributions lag behind the latest versions of tools - sometimes significantly so. Several distributions are still shipping the 2016 Kismet code!
When installing from packages, make sure that your distribution is installing a current version of Kismet - and if it isn’t, continue on for how to install from the official Kismet package repositories or build it from git!
Official Kismet respositories
Kismet provides official packages - release and nightly - for many common distributions including Ubuntu, Kali, and Raspbian.
Learn more about the Kismet packages here!
Compiling or packages?
If you are on a distribution which does not provide packages, and is not part of the official Kismet packages, or are working on developing contributions to Kismet, you can always compile from source!
If you’re using a very resource constrained system, like a Raspberry Pi, you may want to consider either the packages, or making a cross compiling environment - modern C++ can be very resource intensive to compile, and a Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi Zero is unlikely to be able to successfully compile natively.
You can modify the Docker-based build environments used by Kismet for package building as a starting point, hosted on Github
Git code
The git versions of Kismet are the latest, bleeding-edge development. While typically the git code is expected to work, it is often in flux and features may not be fully implemented, may not work, and there may be crashes and unexpected behavior.
The git version of the code may require different options to compile or run, and may not be fully documented until merged into a release.