How To Install Open Visual Traceroute on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Open Visual Traceroute on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Open visual traceroute is a free and open-source graphical traceroute tool, available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows and licensed under LGPL v3. 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.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Open Visual Traceroute on the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Open Visual Traceroute on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gdebi

Step 2. Installing Oracle Java 8 on Ubuntu.

Before starting, Oracle Java is required to run Open Visual Traceroute. By default Oracle JDK 8 is not available in the Ubuntu repository so you will need to add the Webupd8 team PPA repository to your system:

add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
apt-get update
apt-get install java-common oracle-java8-installer

Step 3. Installing Open Visual Traceroute.

The first thing to do is to go to Open Visual Traceroute’s download page and download the latest stable version of Open Visual Traceroute, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.6.5:

### 32-bits ###
wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/openvisualtrace/files/1.7.1/ovtr_1.7.1-1_i386.deb

### 64-bits ###
wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/openvisualtrace/files/1.7.1/ovtr_1.7.1-1_amd64.deb

Once the download is completed, run the following command to install Open Visual Traceroute:

sudo dpkg -i ovtr_*.deb

Once installed, next you can start Open Visual Traceroute by searching for it in Unity Dash. If the app icon doesn’t show up, try logging out and logging back in.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed an open visual traceroute. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing an Open visual traceroute in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Open Visual Traceroute website.

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