Installing Cisco Packet Tracer in Distrobox

guides

Published

April 6, 2026

Preamble

I recently wanted to install Cisco Packet Tracer on Linux. I decided to use Distrobox because it works across a variety of distros without much fuss.

Firstly, you may have to install podman and distrobox. This process may vary depending on your distro, so I will not go into detail here. Once those are installed, you can follow the instructions below:

Main Steps

distrobox create -n packettracer --image docker.io/ubuntu

distrobox enter packettracer

These are the commands I ran, from history

sudo apt update

sudo apt install ./CiscoPacketTracer_900_Ubuntu_64bit.deb 

sudo apt install fuse libopengl0 libnss3-dev libnss3-tools pipewire-pulse qtwayland5 -y

https://www.twitch.tv/khaospuppy Once you do this, packettracer can launch. But, you’ll need to login.

Loggin in did not work for me, as the browser would not open. I had to open “advanced options”, and then select “Internal Browser”. Then, I could log in inside the cisco packet tracer ui itself.

Once complete, I had packet tracer though. I wrote up this guide for other Linux users