Yet another IT blog...

PacketTracer 7.1.1 on Debian Buster

Alejandro Olivan Alvarez -

Hello again world!
So... new year is here with plenty of activity... got finally a week of vacation to regroup and reorganize after my exams and having finally completed at job the core infrastructure migration.

Got a lot of new experiences (and not always necessarilly good) with plenty of new technologies such as PROXMOX5, ZFS, pfSense2.4, but specially regarding redundant layer2 paths under OpenVPN, Quagga OSPF, and CARP...

But today, since I'm going to retake activity at the CISCO's networking academy, let's update the Information about getting PacketTracer running on Debian, on behalf of those pesky missing libraries...
I've been messing with getting the latest PacketTracer 7.1.1 running on my Debian Buster (testing stage), and, as in previous versions, although they provide within the installation folder a /lib subfolder, which contains most of the needed libraries they expected to be needed, as always happens, it doesn't work out of the box... so here we go:

Installation

So, the basic thing doesn't change... if needed, take a look at the first part of an article I made about installing PacketTracer7 on Debian Stretch.
It is the same, no changes, but just the program changes... so, let's make it to run!

Ensure the usage of that 'lib' folder

This time, I have faced two problems, instead of just missing libs:
The first problem was that, for some reason, It seemed that the library folder wasn't used at all by the binary on my early runs... I don't know why, but that was it, so I found...

alex@debian:~$ packettracer
packettracer: error while loading shared libraries: libQt5WebKit.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

 
while, according to installation 'lib' directory listing (I installed onto /usr/local/PacketTracer711, not /opt/pt as suggested, and then I always keep a link at /usr/local/PacketTracer pointing to latest version), the library file was indeed present:

root@debian:/home/alex# ls /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/*libQt5WebKit.so.5
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libQt5WebKit.so.5

 
So, I took a look at the starting shell script named packettracer and ensured that the installation path was correct, so no /opt/pt but (for my case) instead /usr/local/PacketTracer711 ... so it looked good like this:

#!/bin/bash

echo Starting Packet Tracer 7.1.1

PTDIR=/usr/local/PacketTracer711
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PTDIR/lib
pushd $PTDIR/bin > /dev/null
./PacketTracer7 "$@" > /dev/null 2>&1
popd > /dev/null

 
And then, just in case, to ensure the shot until I get all libraries solved, I kept calling manually the library folder pathvariable all the time by trying to run the program like this:

alex@debian:~$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib /usr/local/PacketTracer711/bin/PacketTracer7

 
And that way, the program, although not running, it started to complaing on missing libraries which were actually missing!
Although I probably messed something up during installation, maybe this was due to changing target install dir... I don't know, but, it may be helpful to someone anyways!

Those pesky libraries

The first missing lib was libpng12.so.0
This one can be found on older .deb packages for Jessie and the like... I downloaded and extracted it from libpng12-0_1.2.50-2+deb8u3_amd64.deb

Then, a succession of missing libs such as libicui18n.s0.52, libicudata.so.52 and others ensued...
I realized they all seemed to be present as part of libicu52_52.1-8+deb8u6_amd64.deb and similar packages of the time, so, I simply downloaded the package and extracted all its libs.

So, after puting a copy of all those libs within my /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib folder, the program runs just fine:

root@debian:/home/alex# ls /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicu*
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicudata.so.52    /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libiculx.so.52
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicudata.so.52.1  /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libiculx.so.52.1
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicui18n.so.52    /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicutest.so.52
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicui18n.so.52.1  /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicutest.so.52.1
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicuio.so.52	   /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicutu.so.52
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicuio.so.52.1    /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicutu.so.52.1
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicule.so.52	   /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicuuc.so.52
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicule.so.52.1    /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libicuuc.so.52.1
root@debian:/home/alex# ls /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libpng*
/usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libpng12.so.0  /usr/local/PacketTracer711/lib/libpng12.so.0.50.0

 
So, as (surprisingly!) many many people downloaded the missing lib I uploaded to my server to make PT work last time, I'll do the same again now... but, you know... it is always a good idea to stick to stuff directly and personally downloaded from the original Debian mirrors.
I just compressed them all in a single file, just extract and drop on 'lib' folder, download here: Debian_PacketTracer_7.1.1_missing_libs.tar.gz