My Linux is really rusty - haven't used it for about 15 years - and Altera Quartus and hdl is all fairly new so please bear with me.

I'm looking at using the ordb2a-ep4ce22 for a project. I have loaded the VirtualBox image on my Windows 7 laptop and trying the Verilog and or1ksim simulations in Get_Started.txt appeared to go fine.

I then downloaded and installed Altera Quartus without any apparent problems. I was, however, a little suprised when Quartus started to find that ordb2a was listed as a recent project. But when I tried to load the project I was told the file ORDB2A.qpf was not accessible.

I then realised the path to the file was not correct. Quartus said the file path was "/home/openrisc/openrisc/orpsocv2/boards/altera/ordb2a-ep4ce22/syn/quartus/ORDB2A.qpf" but the actual path in the vitualBox disk is "/home/openrisc/soc-design/orpsocv2/boards/altera/ordb2a-ep4ce22/syn/quartus/ORDB2A.qpf".

Took me some time as I haven't used Linux for many years (~15yrs) but I eventually found a hidden directory /home/openrisc/.altera.quartus/ with two files - quartus2.ini and quartus2.greg where the path /home/openrisc/openrisc/..../ORDB2A.qpf was define.

I changed the path to the one in the current VirtualBox disk image and the project now loads fine. I haven't tried to do anything with Quartus yet, apart from loading the project, as I am still learning so whether this was a good idea I don't know. As far as I'm concerned it stops Quartus showing a non-existent project when it starts. One other point to note - looks like the original version of Quartus was 11.0. Both files mentioned above now have a new section for the project for Quartus 11.1 the version I have installed.

Seemed the easiest way to automatically install the latest project rather than having to install it manually, which is what I thought I would have to do.

Would be good to hear what you orpsoc guru's think.


Another issue with the Quartus install. On my system Quartus is installed in /home/openrisc/altera/....

In the .bashrc file as it comes in the VirtualBox image the path to Quartus is defined as /opt/altera/.... I have changed this to /home/openrisc/altera/....

Anyone explain why Quartus was installed in the path /opt/altera/... Is it so different users can access it? Quartus on my system is installed in my home directory. Doesn't worry me as I'm the only one accessing it. Or should it be in /opt/altera/.... for some other reason?

Would be useful to know why it would be, or should be, installed in /opt/altera/...


Finally an error in Get_Started.txt highlighted by the issues above. Line 44 in Get_Started.txt shows path /home/openrisc/openrisc/orpsocv2/doc to the "latest" documents. This should of course be /home/openrisc/soc-design/orpsocv2/doc.

Next step is to load ModelSim and figure out how to test ordb2a with it, interesting:)

Look forward to reading your comments.

Richard