Install Cisco Packet Tracer on Ubuntu 24.04

install-packet-tracer.md

If you are getting the following errors, read on..

Error while installing Packet Tracer

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 packettracer : Depends: libgl1-mesa-glx but it is not installable

Error while installing libgl1-mesa-glx

Package libgl1-mesa-glx is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libgl1-mesa-glx' has no installation candidate

libgl1-mesa-glx has been obsoleted by Ubuntu 24.04. You can no longer install it from apt repositories. Two new ones are recommended for install (libgl1 and libglx-mesa0) that are supposed to give you the same behaviour, but they do not fix the errors while installing Packet Tracer. The solution below is downloading the obsoleted version from Debian and installing it manually

NOTE: unlike other solutions, you do not need to install gdebi or syanptic. You also can download the package directly from Debian and not from third party repos

---

Download whatever is the latest version of libgl1-mesa-glx you can find from here: https://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mesa/ .

Make sure it is for your own system architecture (hint: this will match with the architecture mentioned in the filename of packet tracer .deb file)

For example: libgl1-mesa-glx_22.3.6-1+deb12u1_amd64.deb

cd $HOME/Downloads
wget https://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mesa/libgl1-mesa-glx_22.3.6-1+deb12u1_amd64.deb

Install the libgl1-mesa-glx package

sudo dpkg -i libgl1-mesa-glx_22.3.6-1+deb12u1_amd64.deb

If needed, run the following to fix errors about unmet dependencies

sudo apt --fix-broken install

Packet tracer should already be in your Downloads, otherwise download from here: https://www.netacad.com/resources/lab-downloads and install it with the following command:

sudo dpkg -i Packet_Tracer822_amd64_signed.deb

For libxcb-xinerama0-dev: https://packages.debian.org/sid/libxcb-xinerama0-dev