Today I had to demonstrate a simulation through Cisco Packet Tracer on a machine that was not installed. In general, stupidity is, that the Cisco stimulator is for x86 machines and for me the machine was x64. When trying to install, he dies with the ugly message

Attempting to install package now
dpkg: error processing PacketTracer-5.3_3.i386.deb (–install):
package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)
Errors were encountered while processing:
PacketTracer-5.3_3.i386.deb

In general, it's obvious that the Debian package doesn't want to be installed because it's for a different architecture. From now on the problem is clear dpkg + forced installation to bypass the error for a different platform. The bin file of the installer is really just an unzipped archive that is unzipped in /tmp/selfextract.XXXXX folder where XXXXX is an arbitrary string. This directory contains the .deb file of the Packet Tracer. The installation is done with the command

dpkg -i --force-all /tmp/selfextract.XXXXX/PacketTracer-5.3_3.i386.deb

Naturally with root rights.

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