Installing Altera Quartus II on Ubuntu Server 11.04 64-bit

IT received a couple of sweet new servers the other day and have been gracious enough to allow me to do some benchmarking tests of our Altera builds on one of them.  They installed Ubuntu Server 11.04 64-bit and gave me the user account.  The following are some of the "extra" steps required for installing and running the Altera tools on a Linux server.

Set the Shell

Ubuntu defaults the shell to Dash to speed up boot times.  We need to set that to Bash.

sudo rm /bin/sh
sudo ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh

Install 32-bit Libs

Before installing the tools, we need to install the 32-bit libraries for the installers to run properly.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Set the Locale

sudo locale-gen en_US

Install Tools

Download the install scripts and run them in the proper sequence.

sudo ./11.1_173_quartus_linux.sh
sudo ./11.1_173_devices_stratix_hardcopy_linux.sh
sudo ./11.1sp2_259_quartus_linux.sh

Note:  You may have to chmod the files to be executable to use the format above.  Otherwise you could replace the "./" with "bash ".

chown The Default .altera.quarus Folder

Since I installed the tools using sudo, the default .altera.quartus folder at the user's root directory will be owned by root.  This is where the tools store tool configuration settings, such as the ip search path.... which will not be writable if the tools are launched by the user without sudo.  We need to chown this folder and all subsequent folders.

sudo chown -R <user>:<user> .altera.quartus

Add Environment Variables

Finally, you need to add some environment variables to run the tools.  Here is what I have in my default .bashrc file:

ALTERA_VERSION="11.1"
QUARTUS="/opt/altera/$ALTERA_VERSION/quartus/bin"
QUARTUS_ROOTDIR= "/opt/altera/$ALTERA_VERSION/quartus"
SOPC_BUILDER="/opt/altera/$ALTERA_VERSION/quartus/sopc_builder/bin"
SOPC_KIT_NIOS2=" /opt/altera/$ALTERA_VERSION/nios2eds"
SOPC_BUILDER_PATH_100=/ opt/altera/$ALTERA_VERSION/nios2eds"
QUARTUS_64BIT=1
export QUARTUS
export QUARTUS_ROOTDIR
export QUARTUS_64BIT
export SOPC_BUILDER
export SOPC_BUILDER_PATH_100
export SOPC_KIT_NIOS2
LPATH="/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/bin"
LPATH=$LPATH:$QUARTUS:$QUARTUS_ROOTDIR:\
$QUARTUS_64BIT:$SOPC_BUILDER:$SOPC_BUILDER_PATH_100:\
$SOPC_KIT_NIOS2/bin:$SOPC_KIT_NIOS2/sdk2/bin:\
$SOPC_KIT_NIOS2/bin/nios2-gnutools/H-i686-pc-linux-gnu/bin:\
$SOPC_KIT_NIOS2/bin/fs2/bin
export PATH=$LPATH
export LM_LICENSE_FILE="1717@flexlm"
alias n2sdk="bash --rcfile $QUARTUS_ROOTDIR/sopc_builder/bin/nios_bash"

That should do it.