Installing Mininet in Any Linux OS

Mininet is a powerful simulator which can simulate the entire SDN (Software-Defined Network) into a computer system with the minimum requirements from the host system. Mininet is regarded as Network within a Computer

You can install Mininet within a freshly installed Linux operating system or within a Virtual Machine hosting any Linux OS. In my case, I have used Ubuntu 18.04 LTS inside a Virtual Machine.

Minimum requirements:

• Computer with 2 GB RAM
• Hard disk space: 10GB
• NIC (network interface controller) Adapter
• Compatible Linux OS(Like Ubuntu 10.04)

Let’s get started…!!!

After you have successfully installed your Linux OS (e.g. Ubuntu 18.04) make sure you update and install the necessary packages.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git

Install Mininet 2.2 from source code with git

git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet

This will create a folder “mininet” in the home directory. It contains the project file structure.

Before installing find the latest version of Mininet, list all tagged releases in the Mininet project.

cd mininet
git tag
git checkout -b version // remove version by the displayed version for e.g. 2.2.0b3

After you have selected the version, use the install script provided in the mininet folder to install mininet. Do not change anything in the script. Run the script file to install mininet. This will install Mininet 2.2 as per the selected version.

~/mininet/util/install.sh -a

After a successful compilation of the script, test the installation. The command below will run a small mininet scenario successfully.

sudo mn --test pingall

That’s all 🙂