Hi Marco,
I spent countless hours and nights pondering around since I posted the question. Tried to follow few writeups and various vintages of Altera/Intel tools. It is frustrating when one just cannot follow instructions and get the expected result, right? One of the issues is that the tools are evolving and the examples come mainly from the time when Cyclone V was a hot new SoC. The chip is still relevant today, don't get me wrong, but there is not as much traffic on this and similar forums as few years back. Frequently you can see someone posting a question and then answering his own question *few months later*. That just helps setting the expectations: Brace yourself and stash enough coffee for the long nights.
I plan to summarize more when I am "out of the woods" but at least a bit of advice for now:
- many issues may be caused by different versions of executables than expected being invoked. (As an example Windows10 (if you are taking that route) has it's own tar and that may break things. Setting PATH is the first step:
export PATH=/bin:$PATH
- Most examples were written ~2 years back and not regression tested. Unless you have a reason do not use latest Intel tools and stick with what was used around the time the example was written. Especially Quartus 20 seems to have added more complexity where you have to download and install ARM DS-5 and CygWin while previous Quartus / SoCEDS combinations took care of that in one download.
Since I went back to Quartus / SoCEDS 18.1 things got significantly better.
- Using Linaro, GNU tools and (kernel) sources as close to what the original author used. Once it builds there is a chance to start upgrading bit-by-bit (if there is a reason).
- Quartus is a Linux application. Altera made it operate well on Windows but under the hood it is a Linux based. However, that need for CygWIN and MinGW makes your setup more fragile. Bite the bullet and get out of the Windows comfort zone. I did another "fresh start" two days ago and it is better now. Just finished building preloader, u-boot , kernel and filesystem (busybox for now ) as per
https://bitlog.it/20170820_building_embedded_linux_for_the_terasic_de10-nano.html
(I found this to be a good example to follow).
At the moment my environment is:
(Windows10) VirtualBOX, Ubuntu18, Quartus / SoCEDS 18.1
Even here you end-up googling and installing missing tools but hopefully you won't be spinning wheels in a mud forever - that was my feeling past month
Good luck.
Occasional Contributor
