You read my blog post about How to prepare for the CCNA exam and you opted for Cisco Packet Tracer for the practical lab activity.

You installed Ubuntu on your laptop/desktop after following my post 7 easy steps to install Ubuntu on a VM and now you ask yourself if you can run Cisco Packet Tracer on your machine.

The short answer is yes. You can install and run Cisco Packet Tracer on Ubuntu.

In this post I will show you the steps you need to take in order to achieve this goal.

Go to Cisco Networking Academy

The first step is to open a browser and go to Cisco Networking Academy. Cisco Packet Tracer can be downloaded from there.

Create an account or login to your existing account

In order to download the software you will need to sign up for a new account. If you have one, you just need to login.

Find the Resources section. From there, you will be able to download Cisco Packet Tracer.

Download Cisco Packet Tracer

After you found the resources section, press on Packet Tracer. A new window will open. From this new page you have the possibility to download Cisco Packet Tracer for your OS (Operating System).

Cisco Packet Tracer is available for download for all major OSes: Windows, macOS and Ubuntu.

You need to download the Ubuntu Desktop Version 8.2.1. As soon as you press the Download button, the download process starts in a couple of seconds. Wait until the download finishes.

Install Cisco Packet Tracer

As soon as the download completes, open a terminal and go to the Download folder.

petru@petru-ubuntu:~/Desktop$ cd ../Downloads/
petru@petru-ubuntu:~/Downloads$ ls -l
total 315616
-rw-rw-r-- 1 petru petru 323186034 May 18 16:50 CiscoPacketTracer_821_Ubuntu_64bit.deb
petru@petru-ubuntu:~/Downloads$

Run the below command:

petru@petru-ubuntu:~/Downloads$ sudo apt-get install ./CiscoPacketTracer_821_Ubuntu_64bit.deb 
[sudo] password for petru: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'packettracer' instead of './CiscoPacketTracer_821_Ubuntu_64bit.deb'

Press the “Y” key and wait until the install finishes.

Press the <Ok> to accept the Software License Agreement.

Next, you need to accept the terms of EULA. This is the last step from the installation process.

Open Cisco Packet Tracer

You can open the application in 2 modes:

1. From the terminal.

petru@petru-ubuntu:~/Downloads$ packettracer 
Starting Packet Tracer 8.2.1

2. By pressing the Show Apps button and searching for Packet Tracer.

First time when you open the application, you will need to login. You can use the same account that you have created earlier.

Explore Cisco Packet Tracer

You can now explore the new application and do some labs.

If you are looking for labs that you can do in Packet Tracer, visit Wendell Odom’s blog.

Additional training for Cisco Packet Tracer

If you need additional information or you want to enhance you Packet Tracer knowledge, you can enroll in the following courses:

Getting Started with Cisco Packet Tracer

Exploring Networking with Cisco Packet Tracer

Exploring Internet of Things with Cisco Packet Tracer

I hope you find this post useful. Share it on your social media channels so that other people can read it too.