Disassemblers for Linux

I decided to learn more about cracking / reverse engineering, so I decided to install a disassembler for my Linux laptop, so that I don't have to do all my work on the home Windows PC.

So I did a google search and I found that my search was a bit useless since that most of them only support ELF files (I'm currently learning on .EXE files first)

In some tutorials and forums, it mentioned that the free version of IDA can be ran on Linux using Wine if I wanted to, but I found that the program couldn't even display the values properly, which makes even reading them a slightly ridiculous task, and on OllyDbg, I found that the letters are pretty squashed up, which makes reading tedious.

I tired disassembler for Linux and the bastard disassembler, but the bastard disassembler kind of lives to it's name, since it didn't even show anything when I prompted it to disassemble a file.

screenshots on OllyDbg:

screenshots on IDA:

So I'm basically looking for a disassembler that can run multiple file formats, along with a front-end, preferably a GUI

If you want to crack EXEs, why don't you do it in a vm? It widens your choices for debuggers since you say some of them are not working under Linux.

I have so far only used VMware Workstation, but I have heard good things about Virtualbox. I'll check out Virtualbox when I get my Gentoo box running in a week or two.

sounds like a good idea, I'm going to try and setup a VM and see how it goes, and I'll give an update when I get it up an running.

<OT>

SwartMumba wrote: I have so far only used VMware Workstation, but I have heard good things about Virtualbox. I'll check out Virtualbox when I get my Gentoo box running in a week or two. Virtualbox is quite good. The difficult part of using Virtualbox in a Linux distro is setting up the bridges to directly connect physical interfaces to virtual ones; this only matters if you're planning to run a virtual application server, though. For everything else, NAT connections are just fine. Virtualbox seems to be faster than VMWare, also.

However, I care more about the flexibility of having an application server available when I need it, over having a faster boot of a virtual XP (especially since I don't use it often). One day, I will puzzle my way through bridge connections… until then, I use VMWare Server in Gentoo. </OT>

find a book. at least read through the index/ chapter summaries and make sure you have everything.