In this year's crop of classes, I am using some Fun™ software in obsolete versions that would work properly if I would just use Windows like a reasonable person. That was not an acceptable choice for me, so I got cracking on the experience that is trying to get old proprietary software running on Linux.

This procedure was tested working on Quartus 16.1 and 18.1. It is entirely unnecessary for Quartus 20.1, for instance.

Let $QUARTUS_BASE be the base directory of your Quartus install, for instance /opt/intelFPGA_lite/18.1.

Quartus

Quartus 16 and 18 have basically the same process to run on modern Linux. There are a few points that need to be addressed to get this working:

For Quartus, I needed to install libpng12 from the repos. It may use some other libraries that may not be installed. You can see what's missing with the following:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QUARTUS_BASE/quartus/linux64 ldd $QUARTUS_BASE/quartus/linux64/quartus

ModelSim

ModelSim (v10.5b) has more interesting problems! To begin the fun, it's 32 bit software.

It will not run with a modern version of freetype2, and to further complicate matters, modern versions of its dependent library, fontconfig, have ABI compatibility issues if loaded with a sufficiently obsolescent version of freetype2. Thus, we have to provide obsolescent versions of both that are built against each other in 32 bit mode.

I have written a script that automatically builds such a pair, available here. Copy the out directory it produces to something like /opt/intelFPGA_lite/boomer-fontconfig, such that /opt/intelFPGA_lite/boomer-fontconfig/lib corresponds to out/lib, and so on.

I needed to install the following multilib libraries from the repos: lib32-libx11 lib32-libxrender lib32-libxft lib32-fontconfig lib32-ncurses lib32-libxext.

In addition to the packages from the repos, lib32-ncurses5-compat-libs from the AUR is required, providing libncurses.so.5.

ModelSim requires several hacks to its launcher script, most of which are inspired by this gist and this PDF originally. Open $QUARTUS_BASE/modelsim_ase/vco in a text editor. (If this is not writable, consider using sudoedit/sudo -e!)

On line 13, mode=${MTI_VCO_MODE:-""} should be changed to mode=${MTI_VCO_MODE:-"32"}.

This script then does some extremely dubious Linux version detection that also does not work as it tries to pointlessly load binaries from a directory that does not exist. On line 210, in the * case, change vco="linux_rh60" to vco="linux".

Finally, at the bottom of the script, just before the if statement that execs into whatever program (this is line 323 for me), insert this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/intelFPGA_lite/boomer-fontconfig/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

This will force ModelSim to load the obsolete versions of fontconfig and freetype2 built earlier rather than the system versions.

Final steps

Consider creating an environment script such as the following:

base=/opt/intelFPGA_lite/18.1
export PS1="(quartus) ${PS1:-}"
export PATH=$PATH:$base/quartus/bin:$base/modelsim_ase/bin

Then, when you want to use the tools, do . ./env.sh. This avoids polluting the global PATH and makes the tools only available when you need them.