Note
- This tutorial is made for linux distributions based on Debian.
- This git repository is based and inspired on https://github.com/baioc/quartus-linux.
You can download the Quartus II from this link. In this tutorial I will use the full download with devices support included, if you don’t need the devices you can download just the Quartus II Setup from the Individual Files tab, but notice that the devices are needed to create projects.
The ./quartus_installer.sh and the ./quartus_env.sh files in this
repository can be used to download and install the Quartus II
software and it’s required libraries. You can clone this
repository in the same directory where you downloaded the
Quartus-web-13.1.0.162-linux.tar archive, set the enviroment variables using
the quartus_env.sh with the source command and after run the
quartus_installer.sh with sudo (required to install the libraries):
git clone https://github.com/rddtz/quartus-for-linux.git
cd quartus-for-linux
source ./quartus_env.sh
sudo ./quartus_installer.shImportant
This process should be enough to install and open the quartus, but is important to keep in mind that some errors can occour inside the Quartus II application and also is important to set the enviroment variables everytime you run the applications. This said, I highly reccomend you to read the section named Enviroment Variables and Library Errors.
After downloading the Quartus, you will depare with the
Quartus-web-13.1.0.162-linux.tar file. You will need to extract the
files from the .tar archive, you can use the following command to do this:
tar -xf Quartus-web-13.1.0.162-linux.tar
lscomponents Quartus-web-13.1.0.162-linux.tar setup.sh
After this you will just need to enter the components directory and execute the
QuartusSetupWeb-13.1.0.162.run file:
cd components
./QuartusSetupWeb-13.1.0.162.runThen the setup wizard will start, it’s important that you don’t change
the default installation directory, who should be something like:
/home/$(your_user)/altera/13.1, after clicking next you will need to
select the devices that you want to install, you can ignore this and
just continue clicking next until the installation start.
After installing, you will see that (probably) some error will occour. This errors happen because some of the libraries used by the Quartus II are not installed or have been removed from the distribuition archives of most of the debian base distros and also because the Quartus depends on some enviroment varibales that are not set by default.
This problem is the easiest to solve since you just need to set some env variables needed by the Quartus II. You can run the ./quartus_env.sh script as show below to set the enviroment variables:
source ./quartus_env.shThe source commands is needed to run the script in the current shell enviroment, it can alse be run as:
. ./quartus_env.shImportant
It’s needed to set the enviroment variables everytime that you start a new shell to run the Quartus, you can achieve this by running the script when starting a new sheel, setting the command above to run in your bash configuration file or setting a cron job.
After setting the enviroment variables, you can try to run the
Quartus II with th quartus command. If you are faced with a
error while loading shared libraries error for the libpng12.so.0
library and try to install this package, you will see that the
package manager can’t find the libpng12 library. This happen because
the libpng12 are not in the distribuitions archives anymore, in order
to fix this problem you will need to install from the web, I used the
libpng12-0_1.2.54-6_amd64.deb found in this link. After downloading
the file i renamed it and installed using the apt package manager:
mv ./e152c9ad6e464ec325d6c8dd1d0f2dae06ebb6d9 ./libpng.deb
sudo apt install ./libpng.debAfter this you should be able to open the Quartus II GUI by using the
quartus command in your terminal.
After running the Quartus II software, you may also face some others library missing errors or other kind of errors. The first error you can face when trying to run a Waveform Simulation are caused by not founding the ModelSim executable directory, to solve this problem you will need check the top menu and follow this path Tools > Options > EDA Tool Options and adding a extra “/” at the end of the ModelSim-A… path, this should solve the first problem.
The second problem that may appear while trying to run a Waveform
Simulation are that some libraries may not be found. In my case, I
need to install the libxft2, libxft2:i386, lib32ncurses5, libxext6,
libxext6:i386, lib32ncurses6, libxft2:i386, libncurses5:i386 and
libncurses5 libraries in order to the simulation work properly, you
can run the following command to install all the libraries:
sudo apt install libxft2 libxft2:i386 lib32ncurses5 libxext6 libxext6:i386 lib32ncurses6 libxft2:i386 libncurses5:i386 libncurses5 -yAfter this tou should be able to run the Waveform Simulation without problems.
The last problem that I faced was that my compilation process was stuck in 26%, it occoured because of the the fitter and is a easy problem to solve, everything you need to do is check the top menu and go into Assignments > Settings > Fitter Settings and change the Fitter effort from Auto Fit to Fast Fit. If this don’t solve the problem, you will need to go back to the Fitter Settings and uncheck the Optimize hold timing and Optimize multi-corner timing in the Timing-driven compilation section.
Tip
If an error that you face don’t appear here, i recommend to take a look at this git repository, it contains some extra informations. Feel free to contact me if needed and contribute to this repository with your tips or errors solved.