Course software requirements.

[paul.l...@gmail.com]

I booked on the FPGA course being held next month and purchased the dev
kit.  It arrived recently and it powers up OK in a USB port.  I've also
rebuilt a laptop with Centos 6.5 then downloaded and installed Altera
Quartus II 13.1.  So far, so good.

One possible glitch: the "Control Panel" and "System Builder" tools on
the CD enclosed with the hardware and on the Altera website (AFAIK) are
for Windoze only.  Sundry forum postings appear to imply that running
them under Wine doesn't work.  As putting Wine on Centos is a fiddle,
I'd like to find out whether trying it is worthwhile.

So: will those tools be necessary /or essential for the course?

[Andrew Back]

Hi Paul,

You should only require Quartus II. if you're in the mood for doing
some additional advance preparation, one thing you could do if you
haven't already, is to look into setting up a udev rule so that you
the program the board without having to run jtagd as root.

Cheers,

Andrew

--
Andrew Back
http://carrierdetect.com

[paul.l...@gmail.com]

OK, so the equivalent of "Hello world" has just started working here.  I typed in all the gubbins included in the tutorial document which implements a 4-bit counter displaying itself on the LEDs.  Finding and fixing the typos from the Quartus error messages was informative.

As expected, programming didn't work at first.  Installing the usbutils package let me find out what the system thought was plugged in.  A quick DuckDuckGo search turned up http://www.local-guru.net/blog/2011/9/25/Using-the-terasic-DE0-Nano-on-ubuntu where a udev inctation is given.  Specifically, creating  /etc/udev/rules.d/40-altera-usbblaster.rules

 with the single line:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001|6002|6003", OWNER="root", GROUP="root", MODE="0666", SYMLINK+="usbblaster" 

Typing that in and restarting jtagd failed to improve things.  Removing and unplugging the DE0-Nano was all that was then required.

Hope this helps other Linux users.