Re: Xilinx issues on Linux

cousteau · ‎05-11-2010

Ok, here are some solutions that have _not_ worked:

* export DISPLAY="${DISPLAY%.*}" to replace :0.0 with :0

* Install libmotif4

* Install libmotif3 (I found an ancient .deb package on Ubuntu 10.04 repositories)

* Install ia32-libs (which are needed by the mb-gcc compiler, by the way; for some weird reason the binaries for the 64 bit version are just the ones for the 32 bit one)

* Run it with sudo -H (note: don't do this; it's generally a bad idea to just run every command with sudo just because it doesn't work without it; I did this becaue I was starting to get impatient). With this option it segfaults much faster since there seems to be a permission problem with portmap that sudo workarounds.

* Install libmotif3 for 32 bits and run the 32 bits version of FPGA Editor (same segfault).

P.S.: The segfault appears just after I get this message:

Warning!!: XKEYSYMDB environment variable is set to a wrong location

(but, according to fransschreuder's experience, fixing that doesn't seem to workaround the problem)

P.S.2: The function wuGetTextExtent() seems to be part of a library called libgdi50.so, which seems to be part of Wind/U, which seems to be some sort of application for porting programs from Windows to Linux in an easy way (sort of like Cygwin but the other way around). Apparently, FPGA Editor is the only Xilinx application that still relies on that library... it would be nice that it were ported to something else (say, Wine or something).

stmartin81 · ‎12-09-2010

Great, same problem here and I'm using CentOS 6.3 which should be binary compatible to RHEL 6.3.

According to this thread FPGA Editor should have been replaced starting with version 11.1: http://www.fpgarelated.com/usenet/fpga/show/69996-1.php

The comment about replacing FPGA Editor was made in november 2007 and I don't see any replacement in 2012.

Too bad I don't have RHEL 6.3 but I don't see any reasons why it should be running there as CentOS and RHEL are binary compatible.

I'm wasting hours when trying to use this software which is really frustrating and costs a lot of money...

bassman59 · ‎02-25-2008

stmartin81 wrote:

Great, same problem here and I'm using CentOS 6.3 which should be binary compatible to RHEL 6.3.

According to this thread FPGA Editor should have been replaced starting with version 11.1: http://www.fpgarelated.com/usenet/fpga/show/69996-1.php

The comment about replacing FPGA Editor was made in november 2007 and I don't see any replacement in 2012.

Too bad I don't have RHEL 6.3 but I don't see any reasons why it should be running there as CentOS and RHEL are binary compatible.

I'm wasting hours when trying to use this software which is really frustrating and costs a lot of money...

The "hours and money wasted" could've been mitigated had you just sprung for whatever RHEL costs.

Sure, the distros "should' be binary compatible, but you've proven that they're sufficiently different.

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Yes, I do this for a living.

voinauiw · ‎11-18-2012

The segmentation fault seems to happen during/after font query. I found two different solutions for this problem. Either

Install xfonts-75dpi and restart X, or
put the following into your ~/.Xresources file and restart X

*SystemFontSpec:-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--14-*-*-*-p-*-*-*
*systemFont:-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-*-*-*-p-*-*-*

wrt Wind/U: I doubt that xilinx will port fpga_editor to another toolkit. The "Open Implemented Design" of Vivado seems to be the fpga_editor replacement. It is just a pity that Vivado does only support series 7 devices and has a completely different constraint format.

cousteau · ‎05-11-2010

I did a very silly thing today:

* Installed Wine 1.4

* Installed Visual C++ 2008 runtime using winetricks (maybe the installer provided by Xilinx would have worked too)

* Mounted the Windows OS partition as read only (I have a Windows partition with Xilinx 13.4 installed, but I rarely use it since all my scripts are mainly intended for Linux)

* Configured Wine to use the Windows partition as D:

* wine 'D:\Xilinx\13.4\ISE_DS\ISE\bin\nt\fpga_editor.exe'

Surprisingly, everything seemed to work like a charm. The program loaded quickly and I was able to successfully create and save a hard macro without any apparent issue.

I don't think it's a good idea to use Wine for running programs installed on a Windows partition (which is why I mounted it as read only), but in this case it worked, so maybe it would be a good idea to use Wine instead of Wind/U. The Wind/U project seems to have disappeared, while Wine is in active development.

However, as voinauiw mentioned, it's unlikely that Xilinx moves FPGA Editor to Wine since FPGA Editor seems to be deprecated or nearly abandoned now that Vivado is out.