Saturday 22 February 2014

Installing Altera Quartus II 13.0.0 Build 156 and Modelsim on Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit

So I thought the installation of Quartus was successful, and I'd finished writing a VHDL test bench, but when I went to launch the Model Sim simulation software from within Quartus I was shown an error message:
Can't launch ModelSim-Altera Simulation software -- make sure the software is properly installed and the environment variable LM_LICENSE_FILE or MGLS_LICENSE_FILE points to the correct license file.
Initially I thought this may have been a licencing issue, which would have been strange since I was using the free "Web Edition".
After searching for a while, similar problems were being experienced by others due to the ia32-libs libraries not being installed, but I wasn't able to install them (i.e. using "sudo apt-get install ia32-libs") since the package was not available.

The solution was to install a different package with the following command:
sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 lsb-core
However, when I tried to run Model Sim from the terminal (done by executing vsim from the /altera/13.0/modelsim_ase/linuxaloem/ directory) I was given another error:
error while loading shared libraries: libXft.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This lead me to install libxft2:i386 with:
sudo apt-get install libxft2:i386
But Linux wasn't done preventing me from running Model Sim:
error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
And I wasn't done breaking down the barriers:
sudo apt-get install libncurses5:i386
After this the software launched correctly from terminal and also from within Quartus II. There's probably a simpler solution or package to install, so if anyone knows, that would be helpful. But for now it's working!