Installed Xilinx ISE WebPack 12.1 on Fedora 12 x86_64

I’ve moved most of my development activities onto my new notebook, running Fedora 12 x86_64 Linux.  Today I installed Xilinx ISE WebPack 12.1 on it.  ISE is officially supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but not on Fedora.  Fedora is closely related to RHEL, so it’s not surprising that it’s possible to get ISE running on Fedora without too much effort.  With previous versions of ISE, I always had to fiddle around with installing legacy compatibility libraries and such before ISE would work.  I was pleasantly surprised that 12.1 installed and worked with no hassle whatsoever.  It is also nice that WebPack is finally supported on 64-bit systems; in the past on 64-bit systems it was necessary to kludge the install script to force it to install the 32-bit WebPack executables.

ISE 12.1 builds my 1802 core and still meets static timing for a 40 ns clock period (25 MHz) on a Spartan 3E (XC3S1600E).  I don’t actually need it to work at 25 MHz for the RetroChallenge, though.

Now I need to get the ELF toggle switches, pushbuttons, and hexadecimal LEDs wired up to the FPGA eval board I’m using.  I could just use the seven-segment LEDs on the Spartan 3 starter kit board, but that wouldn’t look very authentic.

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6 Responses to Installed Xilinx ISE WebPack 12.1 on Fedora 12 x86_64

  1. Jacques Goldberg says:

    Congratulations, Eric

    May I ask you to help me because my “environment” is exactly as yours?

    I installed Fedora 13 not 12 in 64 bits mode.
    I downloaded and expanded Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_12.2_M.63c.1.1.tar
    SELINUX is disabled.
    I went into Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_12.2_M.63c.1.1/bin/lin64
    ./xsetup exits immediately, having seemingly done nothing.

    Thanks in advance
    Jacques

  2. Eric says:

    Sorry to hear that it isn’t working for you. I haven’t upgraded to Fedora 13 because I’m worried about whether the binary-only ATI drivers will work, and the open-source drivers don’t yet support the HD5000 series graphics hardware in my notebook.

    If you want to dive into debugging it, you could run “strace -f ./xsetup &>xsetup.log”, and see what system calls occurred just prior to the setup program exiting.

  3. Goldberg says:

    Hey Eric, i’m running this on ubuntu 10.10, and i’m just wondering what to run after installation is finished. There’s no xilinx in my menus and i can’t figure out what to run under opt/Xilinx/12.3/ISE_DS
    I’m not familiar with the xilinx software at all…
    thanks!

  4. Eric says:

    I use the following script as /usr/local/bin/xilinx:

    #!/bin/bash
    rel=12.2
    bits=64
    base=/opt/Xilinx

    dir=${base}/${rel}
    if [ -d ${dir}/ISE_DS ]
    then
    dir=${dir}/ISE_DS
    fi
    source ${dir}/settings${bits}.sh ${dir}

    $*

    You’ll have to change the variables on lines 2-4 appropriately.
    Then I invoke ISE from the command line by “xilinx ise”. You can also use that to launch Impact by “xilinx impact”, etc.

  5. Goldberg says:

    thx that worked well.

  6. kovalevsky says:

    I found an error while i was installing the software it was that i didn’t able to execute “./xsetup”, in this case for Fedora 16 / 64 bits.

    Please, for those that may have the same problem… verify that:

    For 64 bits
    bin/lin64/xsetup
    bin/lin64/_xsetup

    For 32 bits
    bin/lin/xsetup
    bin/lin/_xsetup

    Have executables permissions.

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