Xilinx development software on Linux (was Re: Getting started with programmable logic)

Ethan Dicks wrote: I used the same board (Digilent Spartan 3 1600E) for several projects, including the COSMAC Elf I recently did for RetroChallenge 2010. It's a great board. Me too. Xilinx supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux with their no-charge WebPack software. (Older releases only supported 32-bit, though you could kludge the install script to make it install the 32-bit version on a 64-bit host.) They officially only support RHEL, but it also works on Centos, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. With some releases I've had to do a bit of fiddling to get them working on Fedora, but Xilinx 12.1i worked perfectly on Fedora 12 with no special effort required. The free stuff supports all Spartan-3E, -3A, and -3AN FPGAs, Spartan-3 parts up to the 3S1500, and Spartan-3A DSP parts up to the 1800. There are size limits on all the others (notably the Virtex families). If you need the details, there's a comparison chart showing the difference between the no-charge WebPack and the various paid editions of the software: http://www.xilinx.com/publications/matrix/Software_matrix.pdf Eric