BEViewer gone?

[Jarad Buckwold]

Hi all,

I looked around for a clear answer to this - apologies if I missed it - but based on the quick start guide it seems that BitCurator no longer includes the Bulk Extractor GUI / BEViewer. I'm curious, why was this decision made? I get that bulk reviewer is now included, but it's not quite the same functionality, at least not as I see it, and a number of my workflows were based around its use, so it's unfortunate. Are there any plans for it to return in a later release?

Much appreciated,

Jarad

[Tammy Troup]

Hi Jarad,

The discussion is probably buried, but the BEViewer required more updates to work on Ubuntu 20 or Ubuntu 22. 

The last major release of the BitCurator Environment prepared the environment for an updated Ubuntu LTS since Ubuntu 18.X reaches its end of life in April 2023. The motivation for the update wasn't to add or remove features. Nevertheless, some projects didn't make it into the new version because of their maintenance status. I think that the BEViewer maintainer asked for user input, so if you want to comment on their project, they would probably appreciate the feedback.

As far as plans to add any the BEViewer or any other project, the BitCurator community actively makes plans to update and maintain the BCE based on user feedback, so thank you for your comments.

Does anyone have any other info for Jarad? Is anyone running an instance of Ubuntu 18.x in parallel with the current version of the BCE to maintain the functionality of BEViewer?

Happy New Year everyone.

TT

[Jarad Buckwold]

Thank you so much for the reply - I appreciate the info. I'll do as you suggest and provide feedback to the BEViewer maintainer. Hopefully that can happen soon-ish, but I'll look into running concurrent instances until then.

Happy to hear how others who use BEViewer are (or aren't) making this work.

Thanks again,

Jarad

[Kam Woods]

The current releases of BitCurator use bulk_extractor 2.0, which includes performance and reliability improvements. This version of bulk_extractor does not yet have a GUI interface; note that the roadmap for that project (https://github.com/simsong/bulk_extractor/blob/main/doc/ROADMAP_2.0.md) indicates that one may be released at a future date.

The short version of our decision rationale is that bulk_extractor 1.5.x releases are not being actively developed or tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04, and BEViewer is not actively (publicly, at least) being maintained. So we made the choice to move to a version of bulk_extractor that would be more likely to remain compatible over the next 5-7 years.

Kam

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