Installing Altera Quartus II 14.0 and ModelSim on Ubuntu Linux 14.10 system

In this tutorial you can install the Altera Quartus II 14.0 software with ModelSim Altera Edition simulation application on Ubuntu Linux 14.10 (utopic unicorn) 64 bit.

Installing Quartus II

I use the Altera Quartus II Web Edition for this example. Download the installer kit (Quartus-web-14.0.0.200-linux.tar) from Altera Download Center-ből. You have to register for download. In the following I continue the installing steps in the command line.

Unpack the installer kit.

$ tar -xf Quartus-web-14.0.0.200-linux.tar

You need to edit the setup.sh file, because the env command is on an other place in Ubuntu; the example below show the head of the edited version (You need #!/usr/bin/env in place of #!/bin/env). Below you have the sed command, which makes the changes.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Copyright (c) 2014 Altera Corporation. All rights reserved.

# Your use of Altera Corporation's design tools, logic functions and other
...

So you can edit the setup.sh file with the following sed command.

$ sed -i setup.sh -e 's/#!\/bin\/env/#!\/usr\/bin\/env/'

By default, the installer installs the software to the $HOME/altera/14.0 path and the command below accomplish the installation without anything asking.

$ ./setup.sh --unattendedmodeui minimal --mode unattended

Launching of the installed Quartus II:

$ $HOME/altera/14.0/quartus/bin/quartus

Setting up ModelSim and compiling FreeType

While the operating system and the Quartus II are 64 bits, the ModelSim is a 32 bits software. To run, it needs the FreeType library, but Ubuntu 14.10 contains 2.5.2 version and ModelSim needs 2.4.12, so you have to install it from source. FreeType is available at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/.

You have to install some packages for ModelSim.

$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5:i386 libxext6:i386 libxft2:i386

Download FreeType 2.4.12.

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.4.12.tar.bz2

Then you can prepare the needed multiarch environment with the following commands.

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc-multilib g++-multilib
$ sudo apt-get build-dep -a i386 libfreetype6

The compiling process is described here.

$ cd /tmp
$ tar -xf freetype-2.4.12.tar.bz2
$ cd freetype-2.4.12
$ ./configure --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu "CFLAGS=-m32" "CXXFLAGS=-m32" "LDFLAGS=-m32"
$ make

The compiled pack can be installed for ModelSim.

$ cd $HOME/altera/14.0/modelsim_ase
$ mkdir lib32
$ cp -r /tmp/freetype-2.4.12/objs/.libs/* lib32/

For using the freetype library by ModelSim, the $HOME/altera/14.0/modelsim_ase/vco file have to be patched. The example below contains a part of the modified version of vco file, and below you have the editing sed command.

...
    *)  arg0=`dirname $arg0`/$x ;;
  esac
done

dir=`dirname $arg0`
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${dir}/lib32 ### ezt a sort kell hozzáadni ###

vco=${uname}${utype}
case $vco in
  SunOS4*)
...

Editing by sed command:

$ sed -i vco -e '/dir\=`dirname \$arg0`/a \' -e 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\${dir}/lib32'

Launch by the following command, or in the Quartus II environment as usual:

$ $HOME/altera/14.0/modelsim_ase/bin/vsim