Questa FPGA Starter Edition Licensing Issue

[rostaman]

I installed Questa FPGA Starter Edition and I cannot get a license for it. I have registered for the licensing site, but I still get "Account Required".

[rostaman]

Hey RFI, I finally got it working!  Before I only had the path to the subdirectory for my LM_LICENSE_FILE.  I changed that to be the fully qualified filename of the license file.  It still didn't work with the change to only the System environment variable, but after I modified the User one too, BOOM!  Success!

Hope it works for you too, friend.

[RFI]

Thanks I am not sure what you mean by "fully qualified name" can you post a screenshot? I was only adding an env variable to User variables, I will try system variable next.

[rostaman]

Oh, sorry.  A fully qualified filename means the full path to the subdirectory plus the filename itself.  You have it how I had it, with only the path to the containing folder.  Instead you need something like C:\Program Installers\QuartusPrimeLite\LICENSE\licensefile.dat.

I'm not sure if that needs to also be in the System variables as well as the User, but I had to put it in User to get it to work.

Please reply back if you got it going!

[RFI]

That did it! Thanks so much rostamon. I am on my way.  I do not know why that was not clear from what I have read, typically variables just point to the folder. 

Let me know if I can return the favor further down the line.

[rostaman]

Woo00t, RFI!  I'm so glad it helped.   

Thanks for the offer, I'll be sure to message you if I need something!! 

[thevene07]

Hi Rostaman,

I'm facing the same issue as you and I did all you said the previous posts. I have set the environment variable to the license file itself. But I still get the error in the screenshot you sent. Can you please help me?

[AR_A_Intel]

Thanks for all the update, hope all is well. This thread will be transitioned to community support. If you have a new question, feel free to open a new thread to get the support from Intel experts. Otherwise, the community users will continue to help you on this thread. Thank you

[Rohitkh]

I am facing the same issue, what is the fix.

[gregorywhitcomb]

I ran into the same problems.  I first ran into the "file or folder not writeable" error.  This was solved by putting the project file (not source files however) in a non-cloud backed-up folder (I had it in a google drive folder and it had the problem).  This solved the file writeable problem.  Then it complained about the missing ".  This took a while looking at various posts to discover that it is a tcl file used to start the simulator.  It is line 122 of  c:\intelFPGA_lite\22.1std\quartus\common\tcl\internal\nativelink\qnativelinkflow.tcl.  the line reads: 

set questa_installation "$questa_fse_directory

so add the quote at the end of the line.

But I would also still get an error due to the license missing.  So I went to the intel website location for Intel® FPGA Self-Service Licensing Center and downloaded the license .dat file.  I put it in the folder: c:\flexlm\LR-144265-License.dat. However, when entering the filename in the tools / license setup / license file selection for quartus, it would complain about the LM_LICENSE_FILE environment variable.  This problem was solved by putting the file path for the prior license.dat file in the LM_LICENSE_FILE textbox.  Also added LM_LICENSE_FILE to the Windows User Environment settings.  This finally worked.  Another thing to watch out for: you need to close the Questa window before re-running simulation with the quartus command. 

I must say that I am utterly surprised by the lack of quality control for this.  Windows 11 is very popular and testing my platform should certainly have been done by quality control at Intel.