when you are trying to install these, are you going to the site that is hosting the software or installing it through the package manager?  (in other words, downloading a .tgz from a site or doing an apt-get?)  Before you get to far along, go into the menu bar, get to the system administration menu, and look for the synaptic package manager.  This is a GUI front end that will help you find stuff to install.  Do searches for the software you are looking for.  About 50% of it will already be supported in there.  For a pampered Windows type this is as close as you'll get to point and click.  For everything else, do a google search on "Ubuntu install [software x]"   The community is really good about posting guides for most things.

Infernox222,

The tgz files are tarred and gzipped, bundled archives effectively, similar to zip or rar files.

You will need to untar them, tar will handle the gzip compression.

With tar you can use the 't' option to test the archive or the 'x' option to extract. Most software will be distributed to unpack into it's own directory although some, usually smaller hacking tools imo, will unpack into the current directory, therefore it is a good idea to test the archive first just to see where everything is going to get dumped.

To test, 'tar tvvofp filename.tgz'
to extract, 'tar xvvofp filename.tgz'

Once you have unpacked them, cd to the directory created (if it did) then you will want to run your './configure' - './configure' reads information about your machine to ensure that the executable is compiled correctly for your system - then the 'make' - 'make' compiles the executable. When you run 'make install' - 'make install' installs the compiles parts of the application into the 'standard' sytem directories - you will need to run as root.

Infernox222,

if you check out this link, http://aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=compatibility_drivers, it details the chipsets/drivers that can work with airodump (de-facto standard for wireless stuffs).

This way your don't have to trust to hope that your newly purchased wireless can can be placed into monitor mode or inject packets.

<edit> after re-reading my own link (pulled from my bookmarks from too long ago) it also discusses the best cards on the market</edit>

Hope this helps.

Pulling down the packages manually is actually the hard way for more common installs that can be found in the standard repositories. For kismet and wireshark, you could just do:

sudo apt-get install kismet wireshark

from a terminal.

Very true. Kismet, in particular, will need additional configuration after install. This is not unusual.

Yes, presuming that your wireless card(s) are working  Of course, there's also GPS, mapping, etc... to configure if you want to do the whole shebang.