Setup insight on Ubuntu 14.04 or Linux Mint 17

Question

I am starting to study Assembly & I am focusing on computer architecture.

(Due to me being curios and want to know more about the inner workings of computers and whats actually going on down in the assembly world :) )

I am following the book: Assembly Language Step by Step : Programming with Linux by Jeff Duntemann (3rd edition)

But after brief flip through of the book. It reveals it's heavily using the insight debugger which noways seems to be nonexistent for any newly released version of Linux.

Is there anyway to get the insight debugger to work (correctly) in the new linux systems and in that case how?

Answer 1

I recently had this problem too. After some research, I found the author's site has a post on this issue from a few years ago: http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=1396.

Most notably, there were comments that linked to this blog that worked for me: http://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2012/01/install-insight-debugger-linux-mint-ubuntu.html

In case there's any link rot, I did the following and can successfully debug stuff on Ubuntu 14.04.4 x86:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/dev/ubuntu natty main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/dev/ubuntu natty main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install insight

Answer 2

Well for the sake of jeff duntemann's book, I made a simple portable version of insight , All you have to do is to download a single binary ( AppImage ) and mark it executable , Then you are ready to rock. Remember this is only for 64 Bits for now. Also you have to use absolute paths for command line. This method does not require root and does not touch the host operating system.

$ wget -O Insight-x86_64.AppImage https://git.io/JGuaH
$ chmod +x ./Insight-x86_64.AppImage 
$ ./Insight-x86_64.AppImage # Thats it.

See the project at https://github.com/antony-jr/insight

I repeat that this project was created by me, only the build scripts and not the source files.