Since about Debian/Linux 11 and above, Intel/Altera Quartus 13.1 has stopped working. It is true that it is already somewhat outdated, but if you still have an FPGA Cyclone III and lower in use somewhere, there is no other tool available.
As such, the application seemingly works, but is unable to perform synthesis of more complex VHDL designs (say 5000 LE and above). I have not been able to find out where exactly the problem is, but it seems to go very deep down to somewhere at the libc level.
So how to run Quartus II on the new Debian ?
- Windows virtualization e.g. in VirtualBox
- Huge overkill in terms of system resources used
- Complicated data sharing
- Wine + Windows version of Quartus II
- Significantly less resource intensive
- Slightly complicated data sharing – different path naming in Wine and Linux
- Can block USB blaster if it terminates incorrectly and even correctly, because jtagservd.exe will still run.
- Chroot + native Quartus II
- Native Linux application
- Takes up more disk space than Wine
- More complicated to run – chroot requires admin rights but proot solves this problem.
The first option is quite inappropriate, the second is straightforward and probably needs no comment, so I’ll only comment on the third one here.
Chroot + Quartus II
The trick with this approach is very simple, just install an older version of Debian/Linux, e.g. 10 (see https://wiki.debian.org/chroot) in chroot and install Quartus II into it.
Then use proot to run quartus, for example as follows:
proot -R /path/to/chroot -b /path/to/dir/be/accessible/from/chroot:/another/such/dir /path/to/quartus/bin/quartus –64bit
