Altera DE2 jtag issues

I'm working with an Altera DE2 board using Quartus II (v12 build 178) running on Ubuntu (6.06), which is installed through Parallels (Build 3188) on a Mac Pro (OSX 10.4.11, 2x2.66GHZ Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 2GB Ram). Lots of fighting and playing finally got Quartus to recognize that a board was connected to the computer, but I'm still having issues. It's probably worth noting that I know almost nothing about linux and am learning as I go while trying to get the FPGA board working.

I cannot get Quartus to successfully program the board. It knows a board is connected (or, it at least now lists USB-Blaster as hardware to which I can write a program), but when I try to program the board with a sample program, I get "Error (209040): Can't access JTAG chain". Running the JTAG chain debugger in Quartus II, any test gives "Error: JTAG chain problem detected" and "Error: No device detected". When I run "jtagconfig --debug" via the terminal, I get:

1) USB-Blaster 
    Unable to read device chain (JTAG chain broken)
    Captured DR after reset = ()
    Captured IR after reset = ()
    Captured Bypass chain = ()

When I've looked other places for help, there were always strings of numbers in the parenthesis following the ='s. But, clearly, I don't get anything. I have the same problems regardless if I've copied pgm_parts.txt to "/etc/jtagd/jtagd.pgm_parts", as I've seen suggested a few times in other places. It appears to clearly be a JTAG software problem, but I don't know enough about linux to try much more than I've listed here.

Any help that can be offered would be much appreciated.