Installing IDA on Windows is very straightforward. IDA’s Windows installer requires a password that is supplied with your CD or via email if you have downloaded your copy of IDA. Launching the Windows installer walks you through several informational dialogs, only one of which requires any thought. As shown in Figure 3-1, you will be offered the opportunity to specify an installation location or to accept the default suggested by the installer. Regardless of whether you choose the default or specify an alternate location, for the remainder of this book we will refer to your chosen install location as <IDADIR>. In your IDA directory, you will find your key file, ida.key, along with the following IDA executables:

Figure 3-1. Choosing your installation location

With the move to the Qt cross-platform GUI library in IDA version 6.0, the native Windows version of IDA (idag.exe) has been deprecated and will cease to ship with IDA beginning with version 6.2.

For installation on either OS X or Linux, gunzip and untar the appropriate archive to a location of your choosing. On a Linux system, it might look like this:

# tar -xvzf ida61l.tgz

On an OS X system, it will look like this:

# tar -xvzf ida61m.tgz

In either case, you will have a top-level directory named ida that contains all required files.

For both OS X and Linux, the name of the GUI version is idaq and the name of the console version is idal. The appearance of the console version is very similar to the Windows console version of IDA, which is shown in Figure 3-2. Linux users may need to verify (using ldd) that all shared libraries required by IDA are available on their systems. One plug-in in particular, IDAPython, expects to find Python version 2.6 installed. You may need to upgrade your Python installation or create symbolic links as necessary to satisfy IDA requirements.

Figure 3-2. The console version of IDA Pro

If you are a Linux user that has SELinux enabled, you may find that IDA complains it “cannot enable executable stack as shared object” when attempting to load your desired processor module. The execstack command may be used to fix this problem on a per module basis as shown here:

execstack -c <IDADIR>/procs/pc.ilx

Users of the advanced version of IDA will notice that they have two versions of each IDA executable, such as idag.exe and idag64.exe or idaq and idaq64. The distinction between the versions is that idax64 is capable of disassembling 64-bit code; however, all of the IDA executables themselves are 32-bit code. As a result, users running IDA on 64-bit platforms need to ensure that any supporting software required by IDA is available in a 32-bit version. For example, 64-bit Linux users must ensure that a 32-bit version of Python is installed if they wish to use IDAPython for scripting. Consult the documentation for your operating system for details on mixing 32- and 64-bit software.

Instant familiarity with the contents of your IDA installation is by no means a requirement before you start using IDA. However, since our attention is turned to your new IDA install for the moment, let’s take an initial look at the basic layout. An understanding of the IDA directory structure will become more important as you progress to using the more advanced features of IDA covered later in the book. A brief description of each of the subdirectories within the IDA installation follows (for Windows and Linux users, these are found under <IDADIR>; for OS X users, these will be found under <IDA-DIR>/idaq.app/Contents/MacOS):