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A few days ago I got my DE0-Nano developmentboard (thank you adafruit-industries). Its cute litte development board for fpga n00bs like me :-)

I ordered it mainly because it supports linux but when I tried to install the software on my ubuntu-box it didn't work at all. The installer only supports RedHat and Suse distros and throws all sorts of missing symbol errors. So I got straight to the altera-download-site and downloaded the current version of the Quartus || Web Edition.

This took a while since the download package is about 3GB. After installing it took roughly 6GB on my harddisk.

The pdf handbook of the DE0-Nano has a tutorial-section where you will be guided through a first simple verilog hdl project step by step. I followed the tutorial but when I wanted to programm my board all it said was a jtag error (89).

After some googling and reading the altera-forum I added a udev rule for the usb device by adding a file named "40-altera-usbblaster.rules" to "/etc/udev/rules.d/" whith the following content

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001|6002|6003", OWNER="root", GROUP="root", MODE="0666", SYMLINK+="usbblaster" 

I also had to kill "jtagd" and start the "jtagd"-daemon as root by running

sudo ./jtagd

from the quartus-bin directory

and then after hitting the start-button in the programmer app (*drum roll*) my first fpga programm ever started blinking on my DE0-Nano board.

Short Summary:

• Don't try to install the quartus software from the cd - it's outdated and the installer doesn't like ubuntu - download it straigt from the altera site
• add the udev rule
• start the jtagd using sudo

This is at least what took me too get it work.

to switch between 2 installed versions of the jdk in ubuntu 2 commands are needed:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

is used to choose the java version

sudo update-alternatives --config javac

is used to change the javac version

I recently found my old Palm IIIe in one of my "old-hardware"-boxes, and wanted to write some programs for it (coding nostalgia :-)). Unfortunately the ubuntu package is broken and every time i started it i got a "hardware exception #3"

not so funny

after some googling i found out that i'm not the only one and there is a ubuntu bugreport including a patch

i could not get the posted dsc file to work so i searched a bit and found out how to apply the patch manually

first fetch the sourcecode of the pose package

apt-get source pose

then change into the directory cd pose-3.5

and copy the download patch to debian/patches

than edit the debian/patches/00list and append the filename of the patch (50_gcc41.dpatch)

change the version of the package using

dch -i

and buidl the deb files with

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b

then change to the parent directory and install the newly build deb files using

sudo dpkg -i pose_3.5-9.1ubuntu2_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i pose-doc_3.5-9.1ubuntu2_all.deb

é voilà! - a working pose