27 Apr
2013
27 Apr
'13
12:10 p.m.
On Apr 27, 2013, at 1:45 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
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.
The FPGA on my board is EP1C6Q240C8.
Yeah, that's... that's pretty old by now. And REALLY small. You
could still run something small under that, but you might want to
consider getting one of the cheaper new boards (the DE1, while it's
a Cyclone II, is still pretty decent especially considering the
interfaces and complement of memories on the board, and it's only
$150 in the US).
- Dave