INSTALLING QUARTUS II V.13.1 64 BIT ON RHEL/CENTOS 6 64 BIT

http://www.digitalsolutionslab.com/installing-quartus-ii-v-13-1-64-bit-on-rhelcentos-6-64-bit/

I have been using Quartus II v.12.1 on RHEL 5 and decided that going through the installation procedure for the Quartus II v.13.1 on an updated RHEL (namely RHEL 6 64 bit) would be a good idea. Right off the bat I can see that there is a need for this … the “Quick Start Guide” given at the Altera website* is a Windows based start guide. So … here is the “how to” on a RHEL 6 64 bit machine.

It is assumed that you have an account with Altera and that you have access to the software download feature. If not, just sign up by clicking here. On the right hand of the page, click on “myAltera Account” and register.

Once you are on the download page, click on Linux radio button, Direct Download, and then on ‘Combine Files’ tab. Click on the download button for the Quartus-web-13.1.x-linux.tar (where x is any given sub-version) to begin. The download time will vary depending on your connection speed.

Once downloaded, create a directory called ‘software’ in your home directory and move the tar file there just to keep things tidy and you may want to reinstall it at a later time (you can leave it in the Downloads folder, but things get messy in there as the browser downloads everything in there. Then, extract the files in that directory as yourself (not root). Note that you do not have to be root in order to install the Altera software. However, in order to install other packages as outlined in this how-to, you will have to be a super user.

Please note that before you can proceed with the installation, the following 32 bit packages need to be installed … glibc.i686, libXext.i386, libX11.i386, libXau.i386, libXdmcp.i386,  freetype.i386, fontconfig.i386, and expat.i386. You may have some of these packages already installed, so just use the ‘yum install [package-name1] [package-name2] …  [package-namen]‘ command, and it will install or update what is missing.

Once the additional packages have been installed, execute the setup.sh script (not root) in the ‘altera’ directory you created earlier. I encountered the first glitch … there is one file that was not outlined in the “how-to” page of the website. However, it was outlined during the installation as a needed file(libstdc++ 32 bit). Thus, I had to stop the installation at this point to ensure that this file (libstdc++) was installed. As it turns out, a dependency was installed, so no foul no harm.

Once installed, the software launched and the installation placed a short cut on the Desktop

However, I noticed the following ‘error’ when the program launched …

[ruben@DigitalSolutionsLab altera]$ tb2_install: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I used the ‘whatprovides’ option for the ‘yum’ command … and found that the file was not installed. I installed the file!

That took care of it … software has been installed!!!

Now how do you execute it from the command line? The idea is just to type ‘quartus’ at the command prompt.  Well, in order to do that, you must edit your .bash_profile adding the following to the PATH ….

$HOME/altera/13.1/quartus/bin

Once added, just save it and execute the ‘quartus’ command. I did that, but I got the following error:

[ruben@DigitalSolutionsLab ~]$ quartus: error while loading shared libraries: libfreetype.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[1]+  Exit 127                quartus

Apparently, not only was libfreetype.so.6 missing, but others as well. I would install one and then it will tell me that there was another one missing. For all of them, I used the ‘whatprovides’ option and then I installed the missing package. All the missing libraries to be able to invoke Quartus from the command line are as follow …

libSM.so.6, libXrender.so.1, libfontconfig.so.1, libXext.so.6 and libfreetype.so.6

Use the ‘yum install [package-name1] [package-name2] …  [package-namen]’ command as done before to install all of these libraries if they are missing in your case. If there is another package missing (your RHEL install may be somewhat different than mine) just use the ‘whatprovides’ option as described above and then proceed to install the missing library if missing. Once the packages were installed, I was able to invoke Quartus from the command prompt. However, using only ‘quartus’ at the command line gives you the 32 bit version of Quartus II. In order to invoke the 64 bit version, just add the option ‘–64bit’ following the command as shown below.

[ruben@DigitalSolutionsLab ~]$ quartus –64bit&

And that is all folks!!! If you have questions, please feel free to post your questions below.

* There is a PDF file that gives a very good “how-to” for Linux. You must search for it in the Altera website.