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Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

HOWTO: Setting up the USB blaster on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

edit: as of quartus ii 11.0, altera finally supports /dev/bus/usb out-of-the-box and does not rely on usbfs. the original version of this post described how to "fake" usbfs support in ubuntu, but thi...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Altera finally fixed their /proc/bus/usb bug in Quartus 11, so now very little set-up is needed to use the JTAG. The only "special" requirement is that if you want to use it as non-root (which you probably do) then you have to create a file to tell Linux to grant access to all users. I use this: 

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/51-usbblaster.rules
#  Altera USB-Blaster rule to set mode to 666.
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="09fb", SYSFS{idProduct}=="6001", MODE="0666", NAME="bus/usb/$env{BUSNUM}/$env{DEVNUM}", RUN+="/bin/chmod 0666 %c"

After you create that, run 

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

And then unplug the USB Blaster and plug it back in again.

Note that for nios2-terminal to find the device you have to first launch Tools -> Programmer in Quartus and select the blaster device in Hardware Setup.