How to Install Open Visual Traceroute on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Open visual traceroute is a free and open-source graphical traceroute tool, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It can also perform packet sniffer and Whois lookup. Data is presented in a 3D map which can be exported to an image file and text file. The gantt view is useful to analyze network bottlenecks.

Open visual traceroute is written in Java and licensed under LGPL v3. The latest stable version, v1.6.3, was released on February 28, 2016. Follow the below steps to install it on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus.

Install Oracle Java 8 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Since open visual traceroute is a Java program, so first we need to install Oracle Java on Ubuntu and the latest stable version is Oracle Java 8. We’ll install it via PPA.

Remove OpenJDK

sudo apt-get remove openjdk*

Add the PPA and install Oracle Java 8 with following 3 commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install java-common oracle-java8-installer

During the installation process you will need to accept the Oracle License agreement. Once installed, we need to set Java environment variables such as JAVA_HOME on Ubuntu 16.04.

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default

source /etc/profile

The above two commands will set the correct Java environment variables.

Install Open Visual Traceroute on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Go to the project’s sourceforge page to download the deb installer. If you prefer terminal, then you can download it with the wget utility.

64-bits

wget http://ncu.dl.sourceforge.net/project/openvisualtrace/1.6.3/ovtr_1.6.3-1_amd64.deb

32-bits

wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/openvisualtrace/1.6.3/ovtr_1.6.3-1_i386.deb

Once downloaded, navigate to the download folder in terminal and use gdebi to install it locally.

sudo apt install gdebi

sudo gdebi ovtr_*.deb

Gdebi will automatically handle dependency for you. After it’s installed, you can start this graphical networking tool in Unity Dash or application menu.

You need to enter your password. The initialization process can take a while.

And here you have it.

As always, if you found this post useful,  subscribe to our free newsletter or follow us on Google+, Twitter or like our Facebook page.