27 Apr
2013
27 Apr
'13
4:51 p.m.
On Saturday, April 27, 2013 17:24:56 Toby Thain wrote:
On 27/04/13 3:44 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
When I started my pdp11 project, Altera's tools were awful - it produced
plainly wrong results now and then, and Xilinx only ran on Windows - I used
CVS to move between my editing machine and the build machine.
Times have changed. Both vendors now produce decent toolchains on Linux -
including the simulators, which have a steep learning curve maybe, but it's
really nice stuff to play with.
I still don't use either vendors built in editors, but that is a matter of
preference rather than anything else - I happen to like KDE's kate very much.
The only thing I have left to whine about is that Quartus does not understand
about changing project files outside of what it does itself - it's internal
make concept does not see any changes in project files. But I'm sure they'll
get there eventually.
On 04/27/2013 03:10 PM, David Riley wrote:
The Xilinx software was the same thing. Up until a few releases ago
(7?
maybe 8?) it was Windows software with a really bad API compatibility
layer
spackled on top. It was all but unusable. Now they have a real port,
it's
very nice and smooth.
Pretty odd for software that started out in the UNIX world in the first
place, and lived most of its life there!
Thanks for the info, folks... I will be curious to see the current state
of Linux tools. This is some progress...
--T
> -Dave Just
wanted to say this thread is great! I have a TerasIC Cyclone I
board here that I am keen to play with, so all information about Altera
and products is very helpful.
I didn't know their Linux stuff was on par with Windows; last time I
used Quartus it was on Windows XP (and Linux/WINE, even - with minor
hiccups).>>
Up until version 11, Quartus on Linux was AWFUL, at least if
you were
trying to run the GUI (the command-line tools were always more or less
OK). Instead of doing a real port, they used a Win32 compatibility
library called MainWin which was flaky and unreliable except on the
very specific platforms they tested on (SuSE and RedHat Enterprise).
It was a pile of garbage, and running the Windows version under WINE
generally worked better. With 11, they moved the whole GUI to Qt for
both platforms, which has been a massive improvement (there have been
a few growing pains; the first version of the editor didn't even have
a way to turn on the column numbering, so I had to use an external
editor to make sure I wasn't going over 80 cols). Everything works
great under Linux now.