Notes for using Burp suite on Ubuntu

I went ahead and tried to run Burp suite on my laptop running Ubuntu today. First, check the readme.txt, which says I need JRE 1.4 or later installed.

marcin@thinker:~/burpsuite_v1.01$ java --fullversion java full version "gcj-1.4.2"

Okay... 1.4.2, but it's Java built into gcc. When I first tried to run it, I got this error:

marcin@thinker:~/burpsuite_v1.01$ java -jar burpsuite_v1.01.jar Exception in thread "main" java.awt.AWTError: Cannot load AWT toolkit: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(libgcj.so.70) at javax.swing.ImageIcon.<init>(libgcj.so.70) at javax.swing.ImageIcon.<init>(libgcj.so.70) at burp.interface.long.<init>(Unknown Source) at burp.StartBurp.main(Unknown Source) Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: libgtkpeer: libgtkpeer.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at java.lang.Runtime._load(libgcj.so.70) at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary(libgcj.so.70) at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(libgcj.so.70) at gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit.<clinit>(libgcj.so.70) at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.70) at java.lang.Class.forName(libgcj.so.70) at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(libgcj.so.70) ...4 more

So, I did a little searching and found I needed the libgcj7-awt package. I went ahead and installed it using apt-get. I try running it a second time and bam, another error!

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException at java.lang.String.substring(libgcj.so.70) at burp.while.public.else(Unknown Source) at burp.while.public.instanceof(Unknown Source) at burp.while.x.instanceof(Unknown Source) at burp.while.je.instanceof(Unknown Source) at burp.interface.long.for(Unknown Source) at burp.StartBurp.main(Unknown Source)

What the hell! I remember seeing in the readme something about troubleshooting,

If burp suite fails to start, or generates the error "Exception in thread main", check that the correct JRE version has been installed. If so, check that the "java" command is launching the most recent JRE, and not an earlier installed version. If necessary, modify the startup command to contain absolute paths to both the JRE and the JAR file, e.g. "/usr/bin/java -jar /usr/tools/burpsuite_v1.01.jar".

marcin@thinker:~/burpsuite_v1.01$ which java /usr/bin/java

Check... hmm, I'll give my buddy a ring and see what he says. He told me straight up to just get rid of gcj and install Sun's JDK. Here's the link, get "JDK 5.0 Update 12." I installed it using the self-extracting binary and wallah!, no more problems trying to run Burp suite. =D

So do yourself a favor and remove gcj -- get Sun's JDK.

Posted by Marcin on Sunday, June 17, 2007 in Linux.