Eric J Korpela wrote: woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: : They could indeed. All I know is the free?/low cost software is : windows based : and the hi-priced software is windows/other. I suspect they think if : you are not : using a Pee Sea you have $$$ to shell out for software. Xilinx' free download is available for Winblows and for Linux. I have downloaded the Linux version, but ran into a brick wall installing it. The downloadable package is actually a .sh file that constitutes a /bin/sh script with binary data following it (I know, a totally crazy arrangement, but I didn't look more closely into how it actually works due to lack of interest in this manure). When you run it, it unpacks into a bunch of other files. Those consist of an installer executable and a bunch of files for it to unpack. When I saw that the latter were ZIPs, I thought I would just extract them manually, but not so fast - they are encrypted!!! The fuckers are forcing the use of their assinine installer, which is of course not runnable. Attempting to run it produces a complaint about missing libXm.so.3, i.e., it's some fucking GUI thing. I didn't even bother finding, downloading and compiling whatever package would provide that libXm.so.3, since the next thing it would complain about of course would be that I have no X display. And if I turned inside out to give it the goddamn X display it wants (that would require making a trip to my old facility, which would in turn require borrowing a friend for the duration of the entire procedure since I don't feel safe going there alone [it's a terrible neighbourhood], and none of my friends have that kind of spare time), I'm sure there would be something else that would make it unhappy and it still won't run far enough to unpack the fucking encrypted archive. In short, Xilinx has done more than enough to deserve the death penalty under Galactic law. They are badly in need of a date with Madame La Guillotine. Fortunately, I may have found an alternative solution using Altera. Not that Altera is any better, but the company for which I'm currently doing a consulting project involving FPGAs uses Altera, and I've got Quartus (Altera's SW) for Linux through them. I haven't seen it yet actually, I've just got an E-mail from the boss saying that the CD is on my desk for me to play with tomorrow. So I'll look at it tomorrow. I'm hoping that I can install it on my Linux box at the company and then copy the installed files to my own one (i.e., pirate it). : Back to FPGA software for the VAX, I don't see the hardware a problem : but the software could be still be one. The small PDP'S has hoards of : paper tape : software, the big ones all need a OS. The OS is not a problem - I am the maintainer of the one true OS for the VAX (which is of course 4.3BSD-Quasijarus). MS