Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorProblem creating symbol files in 10.0
I am a new user of Quartus II 10.0 under Linux (Ubuntu 10.04). I have been using it for a few days, and it works mostly OK after having overcome some initial installation problems (communication with web browser, missing libraries, the automated license registration, etc.). One thing doesn't work at all, however, and that is generating symbol files from the Block/Schematic Editor. My design is starting to become unwieldy, and I want to refactor it into smaller parts. As I understand it, BSF files are the way you link different BDF files together.
I'm running out of troubleshooting ideas, and haven't seen anyone in the forum reporting anything like what I'm seeing. Here's a simple failure scenario: 1. Start Quartus II and create a brand new project with the wizard ("Open New Project Wizard"). Set the project name, directory name, and top-level entity to the same thing ("buggy" in my case). Accept the default for everything else. 2. From the Task box, select "Create New Design File" and chose "Block Diagram/Schematic File" as the type. 3. Draw an input pin A, and output pin B, and a NOT gate inbetween. 4. Save the design file using the default name "buggy.bdf". 5. With buggy.bdf still open and active, select "File / Create/Update / Create Symbol Files for current file" from the menu. Choose the suggested default "buggy.bsf" as the output file name. When doing this, Quartus II now gives me an error dialog saying: "Can't open read-only file /home/ricwe/buggy/buggy.bsf". No matter what I try, I get the same error. There is nothing in the message console indicating what went wrong - it is completely empty. The error dialog is a bit weird in that the program complains about not being able to open it the file for read-only file in a context where it should rather have created it. Perhaps some part of Quartus II was supposed to create the file (and failed silently), while another part was suposed to read the newly created file (and failed noisily). I don't see any file permission problems with Quartus II otherwise, and doubt that is the real problem. In contrast, generating VHDL and/or Verilog HDL from the same BDF file works fine. Generating symbol files from such VHDL and Verilog HDL also works fine for this toy example (but unfortunately not for my larger project, due to pin naming incompatibilities.) I have tried running strace -f on quartus, looking for failed system calls, but I see nothing strange at the time it fails. I kind of suspect some problem with the installation such as missing libraries etc, but if so, it is a silent failure. (I realize that Ubuntu 10.04.1 is not one of the officially supported Linux flavors.) Any ideas? Does it work for everyone else?
