Running Xilinx and Altera Tools on Fedora Core 5

Both Xilinx and Altera make the assumption that their tools are being run
on a ridiculously obsolete versions of Linux. The Quartus tools test to
see if they are running on Redhat 8, if not they set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
to 2.4. At one point the Xilinx tools had a requirement that you set the
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.7. This didn't cause any problems in earlier
version of Fedora Core but it does in FC5. If you set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
to 2.4 it breaks everything, see below

setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4
ls
ls: error while loading shared libraries: librt.so.1: wrong ELF class:
ELFCLASS32

The good news is that it appears that it's no longer necessary to set the
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL for either tool. Both ISE 8.1sp3 and Quartus 6.0 seem to
work without it. 

Xilinx assumed that the user was setting the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL variable so
those of you who use scripts or set it in their .cshrc should remove it.

Altera put it in one of their own scripts, $QUARTUS/adb/qenv.csh. In
order to run Quartus on FC5 you should comment out the line,

		if ( "$REDHAT_VERSION" != "8" ) then
#			setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4
		endif

> 
> Altera put it in one of their own scripts, $QUARTUS/adb/qenv.csh. In
> order to run Quartus on FC5 you should comment out the line,
> 
> 		if ( "$REDHAT_VERSION" != "8" ) then
> #			setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4
> 		endif


I spoke to soon about Quartus, it doesn't work without the
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4 variable. The Xilinx tools seem to run fine.

Josh Rosen <bjrosen@polybuspleasedontspamme.com> wrote:
>Both Xilinx and Altera make the assumption that their tools are being run
>on a ridiculously obsolete versions of Linux. The Quartus tools test to
>see if they are running on Redhat 8, if not they set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
>to 2.4. At one point the Xilinx tools had a requirement that you set the
>LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.7. This didn't cause any problems in earlier
>version of Fedora Core but it does in FC5. If you set the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
>to 2.4 it breaks everything, see below

The Xilinx tools works fine in respect to this with Linux ELF-32 translated
api under FreeBSD 6.x/i386. Infact the older software makes bugs to have been
ironed out in this particular case.
What works bad is tool integration and driver for hardware. .bit files have
to be downloaded by a seperatly written tool.
Installation precedure is horrible.