There are a few problems that occur when installing Cisco's Packet Tracer in Ubuntu 18.04, mainly permission issues and a missing dependency. Here are the steps I took to get it up and running.
- Log in to netacad.com (or register first, it's free)
- Go to Resources->Download Packet Tracer
- Click the link for "64 Bit Download" under Linux Desktop Version 7.2 English
- Move the downloaded file to the folder of your choice and extract it. Note that sudo is required to avoid permission problems (I know, this shouldn't be needed if the file was created properly).
sudo tar xvzf Packet\ Tracer\ 7.2\ for\ Linux\ 64\ bit.tar.gz
- Run the install script
sudo ./install
- Read the EULA and, if you agree to it, accept it by pressing "Y"
- Press "Enter" for the default installation directory
- Press "Y" to create a symbolic link to run Packet Tracer
- As requested, restart the computer (NOTE: logging out and back in may work instead of a reboot)
- At this point, Packet Trace is installed, but it is missing a dependency. If you try to run it, it will print "Starting Packet Tracer 7.2" and just drop you back to a prompt and nothing will happen. The "packettracer" command is a script that actually runs /opt/pt/bin/PacketTracer7. When running this directly, it complains about not finding libpng12.
- Get the libpng12 package
wget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libp/libpng/libpng12-0_1.2.50-2+deb8u3_amd64.deb
- Install the libpng12 package
sudo dpkg -i libpng12-0_1.2.50-2+deb8u3_amd64.deb
- Type "packettracer" and Packet Tracer should start up normally
