niosII-ide not working in 12.0 (Linux)

Altera_Forum · ‎06-25-2012

Hi!

I have a problem with the newest release of QuartusII/NiosII-IDE (12.0). I run Ubuntu 12.04 and I've gotten both Quartus and the Usbblaster programmer working, but I can't seem to get the nios2-ide (eclipse) to work.

The entire situation is very strange. Launching the NIOSII software link from the menu in Quartus does absolutely nothing, so I tried launching it manually from a terminal.

I run:


$ altera/12.0/nios2eds/nios2_command_shell.sh
------------------------------------------------
Altera Nios2 Command Shell 
Version 12.0, Build 178
------------------------------------------------
$ nios2-ide
$

...and the result from the second command (to start the IDE) is... nothing. No error message, no popup, nothing. It just sits there for a few seconds, then return to the prompt. Some further digging led to the (kind of) root of the problem: eclipse.


$ altera/12.0/nios2eds/bin/eclipse_nios2/eclipse

The above command has the same behavior. It won't boot eclipse.

I've verified the following:

* The nios2-ide was, until very recently, working on linux (I have a previous installation, just a week old and using the 11.1 edition of QuartusII, up and running on a different computer).

* I can run eclipse on my system. I downloaded Eclipse classic Indigo (Version: 3.7.2, Build id: M20120208-0800), and it works without any problems.

So, is there a problem with the eclipse package bundled with QuartusII/NiosII-ide 12.0? Has anyone else seen this problem? Is the bug present on Windows too?

Altera_Forum · ‎06-25-2012

I made some progress on this and now have the system running... it is rather ugly, but it works.

Turns out I was trying to run the wrong executable, when I tried to run:


$ altera/12.0/nios2eds/bin/eclipse/nios2-ide

instead, I got some more helpful error messages. Since I'm running a 64-bit system, I was missing some 32-bit gtk libraries.

I installed (64-bit Ubuntu 12.04):


$ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libxtst6:i386

Running nios2-ide still raised a TON of errors, but at least the program started, and is functioning properly (I can compile code and download to my DE2-115).

...still, this should work out of the box. Alteras linux releases are not exactly optimal...