I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
Debian? What was your experience?

Hi,

Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:
> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
> Debian? What was your experience?

My experience with EDA tools on Linux is :
use RedHat (or its free sibling Fedora).
This is the same syndrom as Windows :
all the companies have a "corporate" version
of Linux distributed (and sold, and supported)
by RH so everybody uses it...
I have Debian and Slackware but am quite limited :-(
For example, Xilinx does not work well on Slackware.
I'm now configuring a brand new netbook
with Fedora and I expect many things to work there.

good luck and keep us informed,
Altera is on my install list !
yg
-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:34:22 +0000, Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:

> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
> Debian? What was your experience?

It requires RHEL, it doesn't run on Fedora, don't know if it will work on 
Debian. I use a CentOS5.4 VM on top of Fedora 12, that works perfectly.

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:00:35 +0000, General Schvantzkoph wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:34:22 +0000, Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:
> 
>> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
>> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
>> Debian? What was your experience?
> 
> It requires RHEL, it doesn't run on Fedora, don't know if it will work
> on Debian. I use a CentOS5.4 VM on top of Fedora 12, that works
> perfectly.

BTW Xilinx tools mostly work on Fedora. The only thing that doesn't work 
is FPGA Editor which requires MOTIF, Fedora uses LESTIF which doesn't 
work. I use the same CentOS VM for any Xilinx tool that won't run 
directly on Fedora.

Giorgos Tzampanakis <gt67@hw.ac.uk> writes:

> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
> Debian? What was your experience?

Well, I've run the Quartus beta in Debian 5.0 (Lenny). It seemed to
work just fine, but I only ran a couple of small example designs from
Altera.

General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:

> BTW Xilinx tools mostly work on Fedora. The only thing that doesn't work 
> is FPGA Editor which requires MOTIF, Fedora uses LESTIF which doesn't 
> work.

To be exact, what Fedora does not have is old Openmotif 2.2 which
provides libXm.so.3. A rude hack is installing Openmotif 2.3 and
symlinking libXm.so.3 to libXm.so.4... I got it started then, but
opening files didn't work.

I've also noticed that in ISE 10.1, one of the xilperls is linked
against libdb-4.1, which also isn't in Fedora. EDK seems to call that
one on occasion. But that's a small library and easily compiled from
source.

Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:
> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
> Debian? What was your experience?

It works on opensuse.

       -- Mike Treseler

Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:
> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
> Debian? What was your experience?

Quartus on Ubuntu is one of requiring themes of Altera forum
See here for example for one of the latest threads:
http://alteraforums.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5163&highlight=ubuntu
There was a wiki entry somewhere. I think they forgot to mention that
on x64 before Quartus you have to install 32-bit libraries.

Since Ubuntu is based on Debian I'd guess most things said about
Ubuntu should be applicable to other Debian variants. More or less ;)

On 2010-01-16, Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Quartus on Ubuntu is one of requiring themes of Altera forum
> See here for example for one of the latest threads:
> http://alteraforums.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5163&highlight=ubuntu
> There was a wiki entry somewhere. I think they forgot to mention that
> on x64 before Quartus you have to install 32-bit libraries.
>
> Since Ubuntu is based on Debian I'd guess most things said about
> Ubuntu should be applicable to other Debian variants. More or less ;)

I think I'll try it and see what happens. However, I'm not perfectly clear
on whether the Linux version is free or not. If it's not, I'm not going to
bother going through the pain of installing it, I'll just use the Windows
version.

So, is it free? I'm talking about the Web Edition.

On Jan 17, 6:29 am, Giorgos Tzampanakis <g...@hw.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 2010-01-16, Michael S <already5cho...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Quartus on Ubuntu is one of requiring themes of Altera forum
> > See here for example for one of the latest threads:
> >http://alteraforums.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5163&highlight=ubuntu
> > There was a wiki entry somewhere. I think they forgot to mention that
> > on x64 before Quartus you have to install 32-bit libraries.
>
> > Since Ubuntu is based on Debian I'd guess most things said about
> > Ubuntu should be applicable to other Debian variants. More or less ;)
>
> I think I'll try it and see what happens. However, I'm not perfectly clear
> on whether the Linux version is free or not. If it's not, I'm not going to
> bother going through the pain of installing it, I'll just use the Windows
> version.
>
> So, is it free? I'm talking about the Web Edition.

AFAIK, Web Edition for Linux is still in beta. Still, I see no
technical reasons why it wouldn't work for you.
https://www.altera.com/support/software/download/altera_design/quartus_we/dnl-quartus_we.jsp

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 04:29:19 +0000, Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:

> On 2010-01-16, Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Quartus on Ubuntu is one of requiring themes of Altera forum See here
>> for example for one of the latest threads:
>> http://alteraforums.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5163&highlight=ubuntu
>> There was a wiki entry somewhere. I think they forgot to mention that
>> on x64 before Quartus you have to install 32-bit libraries.
>>
>> Since Ubuntu is based on Debian I'd guess most things said about Ubuntu
>> should be applicable to other Debian variants. More or less ;)
> 
> I think I'll try it and see what happens. However, I'm not perfectly
> clear on whether the Linux version is free or not. If it's not, I'm not
> going to bother going through the pain of installing it, I'll just use
> the Windows version.
> 
> So, is it free? I'm talking about the Web Edition.

Yes there is a free version of Quartus for Linux however it's 32 bit 
only. 

General Schvantzkoph wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 04:29:19 +0000, Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:
>>
>> So, is it free? I'm talking about the Web Edition.
> 
> Yes there is a free version of Quartus for Linux however it's 32 bit only. 

Oh there is a free/gratis Linux version of Quartus ?
Last time I looked (recently) it was only free for ms-windows,
and Linux users had to pay full price :-(

When did the decision to treat Linux equally occur ?
Where can I find informations about this ?
are there forums, press releases or other discussions ?

yg
-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:32:19 +0100, whygee wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 04:29:19 +0000, Giorgos Tzampanakis wrote:
>>>
>>> So, is it free? I'm talking about the Web Edition.
>> 
>> Yes there is a free version of Quartus for Linux however it's 32 bit
>> only.
> 
> Oh there is a free/gratis Linux version of Quartus ? Last time I looked
> (recently) it was only free for ms-windows, and Linux users had to pay
> full price :-(
> 
> When did the decision to treat Linux equally occur ? Where can I find
> informations about this ? are there forums, press releases or other
> discussions ?
> 
> yg

It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of features 
which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is that they 
are transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI toolkit to a 
proper open source toolkit. 

General Schvantzkoph wrote:
> It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of features 
> which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is that they 
> are transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI toolkit to a 
> proper open source toolkit. 

I heard (?) that Xilinx (or Actel ?) has the same troubles
with Windows-based software, and they are forced to use
proprietary Win-To-Lin solutions that make portability
and/or efficiency difficult... I'll have to dig
further in this subject.

OTOH, I tried SiliconBlue's SW and it seems that it was
designed with both Linux and Windows in mind from the very
beginning, and the result is convincing. Some other technical
sides are probably not what others expect, but at least
they seem to manage cross-platform tools well :-)
So I have hopes for the far future (at least the situation
evolved in the right direction these last 10 years,
not as much as expected but I can't deny the efforts).

yg
-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:27:35 +0100, whygee wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>> It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of
>> features which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is
>> that they are transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI
>> toolkit to a proper open source toolkit.
> 
> I heard (?) that Xilinx (or Actel ?) has the same troubles with
> Windows-based software, and they are forced to use proprietary
> Win-To-Lin solutions that make portability and/or efficiency
> difficult... I'll have to dig further in this subject.
> 
> OTOH, I tried SiliconBlue's SW and it seems that it was designed with
> both Linux and Windows in mind from the very beginning, and the result
> is convincing. Some other technical sides are probably not what others
> expect, but at least they seem to manage cross-platform tools well :-)
> So I have hopes for the far future (at least the situation evolved in
> the right direction these last 10 years, not as much as expected but I
> can't deny the efforts).
> 
> yg

I think Xilinx has already made the transition for most of their tools, 
the only things that will never be fixed are the legacy tools like 
fpga_editor.

Hi yg,

"whygee" <yg@yg.yg> wrote in message news:hivfob$js9$1@speranza.aioe.org...
> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>> It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of features 
>> which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is that they are 
>> transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI toolkit to a proper open 
>> source toolkit.
>
> I heard (?) that Xilinx (or Actel ?) has the same troubles
> with Windows-based software, and they are forced to use
> proprietary Win-To-Lin solutions that make portability
> and/or efficiency difficult... I'll have to dig
> further in this subject.

It might be mainwin which was popular many years ago. I remember Leonardo 
Spectrum using it for its GUI-less Linux port.

Hans
www.ht-lab.com


>
> OTOH, I tried SiliconBlue's SW and it seems that it was
> designed with both Linux and Windows in mind from the very
> beginning, and the result is convincing. Some other technical
> sides are probably not what others expect, but at least
> they seem to manage cross-platform tools well :-)
> So I have hopes for the far future (at least the situation
> evolved in the right direction these last 10 years,
> not as much as expected but I can't deny the efforts).
>
> yg
> -- 
> http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org 

Giorgos Tzampanakis <gt67@hw.ac.uk> writes:

> I want to run Quartus on my Debian computer. I see that Altera doesn't
> officially support Debian. Has anyone here managed to run Quartus on
> Debian? What was your experience?

I haven't used it on Debian, but I've used it on Gentoo for years. I
also have some colleagues using Ubuntu. However, I always keep a Red
Hat system at hand (previously I had a separate system, but now I have
it running in VirtualBox). If I observe a problem I and if it's
reproducible on the RedHat system I can call Altera support.

The core of the Altera software seem to be very portable, however the
little scripts to determine the platform type etc. are written in csh
and seem quite strange to me. I've seen that the start-up script have
got confused at times, but by manually setting PATH and
LD_LIBRARY_PATH have made it work.

I was disappointed when I started Quartus 9.1 on my Gentoo and
observed this message:

rpm: Command not found.

It seems like the start-up script is using rpm to find packages, which
will of course fail on systems not using rpm packages. However, it
will still run fine.

Many vendors seem to try to figure out what kind of system their
software is running on rather than trying to check if the system
provide the *features* they require. I've seen some software which
will check /etc/redhat-release and if it does not contain what they
expect it will fail. However, making an /etc/redhad-release with the
right content will make the tool run.

I understand that they only provide support using a single distro, but
they should at least try to support multiple distros.

Petter

-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

On 17 Jan 2010 17:33:29 GMT, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:27:35 +0100, whygee wrote:
>
>> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>>> It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of
>>> features which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is
>>> that they are transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI
>>> toolkit to a proper open source toolkit.
>> 
>> I heard (?) that Xilinx (or Actel ?) has the same troubles with
>> Windows-based software, and they are forced to use proprietary
>> Win-To-Lin solutions that make portability and/or efficiency
>> difficult... I'll have to dig further in this subject.

>I think Xilinx has already made the transition for most of their tools, 
>the only things that will never be fixed are the legacy tools like 
>fpga_editor.

And much of the demonstration software relating to AppNotes, board starter kits
etc.

The strangest is one of the PCIe DMA demonstration apps, (XAPP859 or XAPP1052)
which is Windows-only, but with its GUI based on (open-source) GTK...

- Brian

General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:

> I think Xilinx has already made the transition for most of their tools, 
> the only things that will never be fixed are the legacy tools like 
> fpga_editor.

Just out of curiosity, since you mentioned you run Xilinx tools in
Fedora. Have you tried the 64-bit fpga_editor from ISE 11.1.04? I just
get a segmentation fault.

"HT-Lab" <hans64@ht-lab.com> writes:

> It might be mainwin which was popular many years ago. I remember Leonardo 
> Spectrum using it for its GUI-less Linux port.

I dunno, Xilinx fpga_editor and Actel's Libero use Wind/U. I remember
Mentor's Precision used Mainwin also, at least around 2005 when I last
used it.

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:09:17 +0200, Anssi Saari wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
>> I think Xilinx has already made the transition for most of their tools,
>> the only things that will never be fixed are the legacy tools like
>> fpga_editor.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, since you mentioned you run Xilinx tools in
> Fedora. Have you tried the 64-bit fpga_editor from ISE 11.1.04? I just
> get a segmentation fault.

I run that in a CentOS 5 VM. I almost never use the GUI for Xilinx tools, 
I do everything with scripts. I have brought up the ISE GUI just to check 
which parts are supported and it does work in Fedora. I don't have 
scripts for the Altera tools so I run Quartus from it's GUI which crashes 
on Fedora but does work on 64 bit CentOS5. The Quartus 9.1 GUI is very 
buggy, at least it is the way I run it which is to ssh into a CentOS5.4 
VM. You have to be extremely delicate when you select a file to open from 
Quartus, dragging the mouse over a file name will cause a modal box to 
appear which hangs the interface about 50% of the time. The only solution 
is to kill Quartus using the dead app widget or from the command line and 
then restart it. The close box on Quartus is useless when it gets into 
this state because it's hung in some mode box. The SignalTap application 
and Timequest work fine, it's just the basic GUI which is broken. BTW 
I've found that I can't run SignalTap reliably from a native CentOS5.4 
machine, the Linux driver for the download cable is crap. The Linux 
driver for Chipscope is also a pain, it would be nice if Altera and 
Xilinx would provide proper GPLed drivers for their download cable so 
that they could be built into the kernel. Running SignalTap and ChipScope 
are the only things that I use Windows for. I put XP on an old single 
core machine which I access from rdesktop from my Linux machines.

whygee wrote:
> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>> It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of 
>> features which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is 
>> that they are transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI 
>> toolkit to a proper open source toolkit. 
> 
> I heard (?) that Xilinx (or Actel ?) has the same troubles
> with Windows-based software, and they are forced to use
> proprietary Win-To-Lin solutions that make portability
> and/or efficiency difficult... I'll have to dig
> further in this subject.
> 

I don't remember the details, but I believe that both Altera and Xilinx 
used the same windows-to-linux library originally for their Linux ports, 
and that that particular library was royalty based.  Being royalty 
based, it is very difficult to make it available freely.  I guess they 
had good reason for picking that library at the time, but it has always 
seemed strange to me that the software should be build so strongly on 
*nix style solutions (lots of perl and tcl, amongst other things) and 
yet be so difficult to move to Linux.

David Brown <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> writes:

> I don't remember the details, but I believe that both Altera and
> Xilinx used the same windows-to-linux library originally for their

I think Xilinx used WindU and Altera used (and still use) Mainwin
originally, at least when I used the tools on SunOS/Solaris.

Petter
-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:

> on Fedora but does work on 64 bit CentOS5. The Quartus 9.1 GUI is very 
> buggy, at least it is the way I run it which is to ssh into a CentOS5.4 
> VM. You have to be extremely delicate when you select a file to open from 
> Quartus, dragging the mouse over a file name will cause a modal box to 
> appear which hangs the interface about 50% of the time. The only solution 

I do all my builds using scripts, but sometimes I use the GUI to run
signaltap, the pin editor, chip planner, timing analyzer, megawizard,
and sopc builder. I've never experienced problems like you describe. I
don't get any modal boxes appearing whenever I move the mouse over
filenames in the open dialog box. I'm using Quartus 9.0 and 9.1 under
Gentoo with the sawfish window manager. I'm running most of my builds
on a remote machine over X11, but some builds are done locally
depending upon the load on the machines.

> I've found that I can't run SignalTap reliably from a native CentOS5.4 
> machine, the Linux driver for the download cable is crap. The Linux 

I've had minor problems with SignalTap under Linux in the past
(Quartus 7/8 or earlier if memory serves me right). But since 9.x I
haven't seen any problems and I use SignalTap, gdb, quartus_pgm, and
nios2-download, both locally and remotely using the Altera JTAG
server. However, I tend to instantiate megawizard generated signaltap
components rather than building them in the GUI.

> driver for Chipscope is also a pain, it would be nice if Altera and 
> Xilinx would provide proper GPLed drivers for their download cable so 

Or at least document the API, so I could make a signaltap and
chipscope interface for my ethernet based programmer.


Petter
-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:06:51 +0100, Petter Gustad wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
>> on Fedora but does work on 64 bit CentOS5. The Quartus 9.1 GUI is very
>> buggy, at least it is the way I run it which is to ssh into a CentOS5.4
>> VM. You have to be extremely delicate when you select a file to open
>> from Quartus, dragging the mouse over a file name will cause a modal
>> box to appear which hangs the interface about 50% of the time. The only
>> solution
> 
> I do all my builds using scripts, but sometimes I use the GUI to run
> signaltap, the pin editor, chip planner, timing analyzer, megawizard,
> and sopc builder. I've never experienced problems like you describe. I
> don't get any modal boxes appearing whenever I move the mouse over
> filenames in the open dialog box. I'm using Quartus 9.0 and 9.1 under
> Gentoo with the sawfish window manager. I'm running most of my builds on
> a remote machine over X11, but some builds are done locally depending
> upon the load on the machines.

My set up is as follows. My workstation and my servers are all running 64 
bit Fedora 12, the workstation is running Gnome the servers run at Init 
3. I'm running Quartus 9.1 on a KVM 64 bit CentOS5.4. VM (Init 3) on my 
servers. I ssh into the VM and then execute Quartus from an Xemacs shell. 
Quartus is the only program that gives me any trouble.

David Brown wrote:
> I don't remember the details, but I believe that both Altera and Xilinx 
> used the same windows-to-linux library originally for their Linux ports, 
> and that that particular library was royalty based.  Being royalty 
> based, it is very difficult to make it available freely.
that is coherent with what I have heard from rep/sales people in tradeshows...

> I guess they 
> had good reason for picking that library at the time, but it has always 
> seemed strange to me that the software should be build so strongly on 
> *nix style solutions (lots of perl and tcl, amongst other things) and 
> yet be so difficult to move to Linux.
who knows why :-/

yg
-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org