Installing Quartus under Ubuntu 14.04 (and possibly others)

THIS HOWTO IS DEPRECATED

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Introduction

This page contains a few notes on installing Altera's Quartus II under Ubuntu 14.04. It might be useful to people installing Quartus under Ubuntu 14.04 or later.

Some references before we start:

• This page is based on these pages online:
  • Altera USB-Blaster with Ubuntu 14.04
  • Altera USB blaster download cable User Guide
  • Solution to failing Altera jtag chain on ubuntu version >12.04 64-bit

• The old page on installing Quartus under Ubuntu (in German)
  • Installieren Quartus II auf ein Ubuntu System

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Download, configuration & install

• Download Quartus 13.1 from the Altera website
• Once your Quartus has downloaded, untar the archive and run the setup.sh script in the downloaded

mkdir quartus
tar xvf Quartus-13.1.0-*.tar
cd quartus/

• You might need some 32-bit libraries to make Quartus work under 14.04:

sudo apt-get install libxext6:i386
sudo apt-get install libxtst6:i386
sudo apt-get install libxi6:i386

• Run

sudo bash ./setup.sh

• Follow the installation instructions in the window
  • If you want to not have any fuss with working with the repositories (bel_projects in particular), choose the following install directory (hence the sudo)

/opt/quartus/

• Add the following lines to your .bashrc (and possibly others, if you use the Nios-II IDE):

export QUARTUS_ROOTDIR_OVERRIDE="/opt/quartus"
export QUARTUS_64BIT=1

• Make a link to the quartus executable so you can run it from the command-line (the following assumes you installed Quartus in /opt/quartus):

sudo ln -s /opt/quartus/bin/quartus /bin/quartus

• You should now be ready to run Quartus. The first time you run it, if you went for the subscription version, you will need to register a license for your software.

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Installing the USB Blaster

This is actually the biggest challenge of them all. The website also mentioned at the beginning is the reference for installing the USB blaster, so if you want the bigger picture and a longer description, go to this website:

• Altera USB-Blaster with Ubuntu 14.04

This page just shows a list of steps that I've done to make the cables work.

• Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-altera-usbblaster.rules
• Adding these lines to the file will add support for both USB-Blaster-I and II=

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTR{idProduct}=="6001", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTR{idProduct}=="6002", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTR{idProduct}=="6003", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTR{idProduct}=="6010", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTR{idProduct}=="6810", MODE="0666"

• Restart your PC (I've found sudo udevadm control --reload didn't work in my case)
• Run jtagconfig to test the chain (again, assuming Quartus install dir as /opt/quartus)

$ /opt/quartus/bin/jtagconfig
1) USB-Blaster [3-2]
  02A010DD   5AG(TMC3D3|XBA3D4|XBA3D6)

In case you see this error message,

$ /opt/quartus/bin/jtagconfig
1) USB-Blaster [3-2]
  Unable to read device chain - JTAG chain broken

your USB Blaster works, but you can't to connect to the JTAG chain. A possible cause can be a missing 32 Bit version of libudev.

• Download libudev1:i368 and create a symbolic link

$ sudo apt-get install libudev1:i386
$ sudo ln -sf /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

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Other possible problems

This section may not be important for you. Refer to it only if you have problems with Quartus in operation.

If anything, you should remember to keep a copy of the setup.sh script at hand.

During running Quartus, you might have it complaining about other libraries not being installed. Make sure you keep your setup.sh file at hand to check out which libraries it checks for on install.

Download these libraries in 32-bit mode (i386).

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-- TheodorStana - 12 Mar 2015