Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
11 years ago

problem running modelsim on ubuntu 14.04

Hi all -- I'm just posting this here in case it is useful to others (and hoping that someone smarter will have an elegant solution or more information). I am generally good at googling for solutions to this stuff but information is sparse on this one.

Yesterday I went with the masses and upgraded a new machine to ubuntu 14.04. Of the tools i'm trying to learn (I'm new to this world), the only obvious thing that broke was modelsim (that is the only thing I noticed). The latest matlab, quartus, dsp-builder and everything else I'm counting on *seem* to be working fine.

It turns out that others seem to have experienced it in other linux versions in recent months and it is related to a libfreetype6 version issue (see here: https://communities.mentor.com/mgcx/thread/13821?tstart=0).

Launching vsim would cause a segmentation fault.

I forced the install of an older version of libfreetype and now modelsim launches fine but I am unsure of the state of anything else on this machine. I did not use the exact solution recommended in that thread above but may get to the point of doing that now that I understand at least a bit about the problem.

If anyone has a cleaner solution other than sticking with ubuntu 12.04/13.1, please let me know. The compatibility of the various tools vs. operating system is a bit messy (especially when you span into SoCKit territory with yocto where Ubuntu is recommended even though not supported officially by Quartus), but that is another story...

Thanks !

Lance

14 Replies

Show More
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    11 years ago

    you others that have fixed modelsim with matthews fix, (yes it partially works, if i start modelsim with bin/vsim from a terminal) but if i click on RTL simulation or want Quartus II 64bit (14.0) to make me a testbench, then quartus_sh goes defunct after it trys to spawn modelsim, that is it trys to start modelsim but it crashes..

    or does everyone create there do files by hand with this fix, and run the do from inside vsim started externaly?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    11 years ago

    I always use testbench + .do files, both created by hand. I don't know what crash message you've got, but on previous versions sometimes Quartus calls modelsim and try to generate a tesbench in verilog (but my design is in VHDL). It simple crash saying that couldn't find the verilog file (that was supposed to be created automatically).

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    11 years ago

    Yes, in my case I have (to this point) always created my own testbenches and launched modelsim stand-alone. I would like to start trying to run modelsim from Quartus (to at least try that method), so if anyone does come up with a fix, I would like to see.

    Otherwise maybe if we can track down how Quartus is launching it, perhaps there is a similar fix (i.e. through modifying a script that Quartus calls).

    -Lance
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    11 years ago

    it launches a quartus_sh script it seems if you do a ps aux|grep quartus .. its also the script it references in nativelink report file and/or in the console windows in quartus when you click RTL sim...

    i've installed centos 6,5 just cause quartus works as expected there.. so i can keep up with the studies..