Cisco Packet Tracer Installation In Arch OS

Cisco Packet Tracer should be a must-have tool for any Network Engineer. Not only for Network Engineers, packet tracer is really a handful tool to learn many computer science concepts. Despite being such an amazing software, there is no official support for many Linux distros including Arch. But, installing packet tracer on Arch-based distro would only take 5 steps.

1. Download Cisco Packet Tracer .deb from Cisco Netacad. You will find this under the Resources Section. Download Ubuntu Desktop Version.

Note: You have to have an account on Netacad to download Packet Tracer

1. Download or clone the build files from packettracer AUR.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packettracer.git

1. Move the .deb file into the cloned packettracer directory where your build files are. Now, your folder structure should appear as below.

 .
├──  CiscoPacketTracer_820_Ubuntu_64bit.deb
├──  packettracer.sh
└──  PKGBUILD

1. Let's build the package. After executing the below command, it will output a .pkg.tar.zst file. Build-time dependencies and temporary files will be removed after installation.

makepkg -sirc

1. Only do this step if Packet Tracer isn't installed by now on your system. Or, if you didn't use -i flag in the above command. So, this below command actually takes .pkg.tar.zst file as an argument to manually install it.

sudo pacman -U package_name-version-architecture.pkg.tar.zst

That's it. Still stuck! Check out Arch Wiki On Packet Tracer.