How to Install Cisco Packet Tracer on any Linux distro

Officially Cisco Packet Tracer only supports Ubuntu for installation. However, in reality the Ubuntu installation is an appimage, wrapped neatly in a .deb installation file. This technique is called repackaging or bundling.

We simply have to extract the appimage and run it!

• Step 1: Download the Ubuntu version of the file from the official Cisco Networking website. You should have gotten a .deb file with a similar name to “CiscoPacketTracer_900_Ubuntu_64bit.deb”
• Step 2: Depending on you distro this step might vary. I am on “Fedora KDE”, therefore I just right clicked the file and extracted it through Dolphin. If there is no extraction option, don’t worry I got you covered! Simply cd into the same directory as the file and run the command!

ar -x CiscoPacketTracer*.deb

• Step 3: Now you should have 5 files. These are the files used by Ubuntu’s Package manager to install the application. However we are only interested in the “data.tar.xz” file. This is where the appimage lies! Do the same as Step 2 and extract it. There should be a GUI option to extract it as its just a tar file. Orrrrr you can just do it the terminal way!

tar -xf data.tar.xz

• Step 4: After extraction, a folder called “opt”, appears. Inside “opt” there is another folder called “pt” and inside that lies the appimage! Simply double click the appimage and viola! (It might ask you if you trust this program. Click yes!). You can now move the appimage to anywhere and it will simply work.

Note: If it doesn’t launch, run it from the terminal to see if you are missing any system-level dependencies.

— OR —

You can cd into the same directory as the .deb file, and run the following command. Then simply run the appimage!

ar -x CiscoPacketTracer*.deb && tar -xf data.tar.xz --wildcards '*AppImage' --strip-components=3 && rm data.tar.xz control.tar.xz debian-binary _gpgorigin && chmod +x packettracer.AppImage && echo "Success! You can now run the AppImage."

This is a really sneaky way for developers to distribute their software. However in the Linux community this is frowned upon, due to the downsides of appimage. As appimages carry all the required libraries with them, which in-turn increases the software size and don’t get me started on the security concerns.

Stay Curious!