Cisco Packet Tracer can be a very useful tool for learning about networking without needing to spend tons of money(infact, none). The simulator allows you to create a networking topology & then carry on your configurations & changes before they can be implemented in the real world networking environment. This is critical as you get to learn from any mistakes in simulation thus not needing your network to act as a guinea pig. Here, I’ll show you how you can install the Cisco Packet Tracer under your linux system. I would be installing it on Fedora 18.

Cisco Packet Tracer Linux

You can download the Cisco Packet Tracer from here. This blog has distro related packages for Ubuntu & Fedora linux.

Once downloaded, open a shell & change to the directory where you downloaded the .bin file. Upon changing to the directory, you’ll need to make the .bin file executable. To do so;

#chmod 764 PacketTracer533_i386_installer-rpm.bin

Once done, you should now be able to execute this file using;

#./PacketTracer533_i386_installer-rpm.bin

If all goes well, it will provide you with a license agreement. Else it will prompt you for unfulfilled dependencies. In my case, it asked for the following missing library file;

libXrandr.so.2 is needed by PacketTracer-1:5.3.3-1.i586

I resolved this dependency using the following yum command;

#yum install libXrandr.so.2

Once you’re done installing the dependencies, again issue the execute command shown above.You would be asked to accept the license agreement & once you accept it, the installer will proceed to install the Cisco Packet Tracer on your system.

#./PacketTracer533_i386_installer-rpm.bin

Self extracting archive…

 

Welcome to Cisco Packet Tracer 5.3.3 Installation

Read the following End User License Agreement “EULA” carefully. You must accept the terms of this EULA to install and use Cisco Packet Tracer 5.3.3.

Press the Enter key to read the EULA.

Do you accept the terms of this EULA? (Y)es/(N)o

Y

You have accepted the terms to the EULA. Cisco Packet Tracer will now be installed.

Attempting to install package now

Preparing… ################################# [100%]

Updating / installing…

1:PacketTracer-1:5.3.3-1 ################################# [100%]

Installed files. Please wait for post-install operations to finish..

gtk-update-icon-cache: Cache file created successfully.
Writing PT5HOME environment variable to /etc/profile

Congratulations, you’ve installed the Cisco Packet Tracer successfully on your system. It can be found under your applications.