Running Quartus on an Apple Mac

[Altera_Forum]

Has anyone tried running Quartus on a Mac, using Parallels etc? 

 Any luck?  Thanks Hamish

[Altera_Forum]

Good luck, let us all know how it goes. 

 (I would not even try this).  Avatar

[Altera_Forum]

I'm not going to try either, but I know a couple of engineers wanting to switch to a Mac and they asked me.  

 Quartus is trouble enough in the windows environment....  H

[Altera_Forum]

Hello, 

I was wondering if anyone has been able to run Altera Design Software (Quartus and Nios) on an Apple Mac? Either by dual booting their computer with Windows or using virtualization software.  Thanks, Matt

[Altera_Forum]

Obviously if you dual-boot Windows, it will work. I should also work running a virtual machine.

[Altera_Forum]

i've never tired on a Mac but i've run Quartus II in virtualized Fedora 10-32 (Windows XP-32 host), Windows XP-64 (Fedora 10 host), and Windows Vista-64 (Centos 4/5 host).

[Altera_Forum]

You have no idea how hard I'm trying not to start a MAC vs. PC battle here. I'd do it if I could find some way to make it FPGA-centric. Problem is when it comes to FPGA's the debate ends too quickly ... Don't use a MAC. 

 Jake

[Altera_Forum]

Thanks for the Tips. After some research maybe MAC is not the way to go. Thanks Again.

[Altera_Forum]

i think its worth a try with VirtualBox (which I've used with success on Windows hosts) or Parallels.

[Altera_Forum]

I am waiting to see if a new thread appears titled "Does anyone want to buy a Mac?" ;-)

[Altera_Forum]

Yes i have a Macbook Air and ran Quartus on a Mac, using Parallels..  

it work ok

[Altera_Forum]

Did you have an opportunity to determine the Quartus compilation speed compared to a recent Intel PC?

[Altera_Forum]

Yes it took like 3 min

[Altera_Forum]

cool thanks for adding to the thread :D

[Altera_Forum]

I'm using a Macbook Pro 15", the first Mac with intel processor, and i use quartus with parallels. 

 It runs as fast as my Core Duo of my office...

[Altera_Forum]

I have a mac (several actually). Quartus runs fine under VMWare virtual machine. It actually runs better, because I can have a VM that is tailored just for Quartus. My PC (which I keep just to run non-mac programs) has lots of cruft.. it happens to be a Quad Core with 4GB of Ram. It is a pretty hefty box, and Quartus does run about 5% faster, but considering I am running it on a VM under OSX on a Core 2 Duo Laptop... It is plenty fast. 

 On a side note - a number of posts here were seemingly "anti mac".. I suspect that 100% of the "anti mac" crowd has never used one. If that is true, then your opinion use useless and you should keep it to yourself. I have used both, at least I have something to compare.. Okay, down from my soapbox.  Quartus is currently supported on 3(?) versions of Unix. Macs run Unix. Again, to those that made lame comments about how FPGA's don't run on macs or whatever... never mind.  Adding "Mac" to the list of Quartus platforms would require some amount of work, but it should not be a prohibitive task, since the Mac supports X11 and is a Unix core. Porting Quartus to be a *native* Mac application, a cocoa app, would be more effort. It would be nice if they could at least get it to X11.

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  I'm not going to try either, but I know a couple of engineers wanting to switch to a Mac and they asked me.   Quartus is trouble enough in the windows environment....  H  --- Quote End ---    And you blame this on Quartus?

[Altera_Forum]

No need to port to cocoa. Altera is porting Quartus to "Qt", and that one runs fine on all major OSes (MSwin, Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris) 

Qt is the best invention after hot chocolate :)

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  No need to port to cocoa. Altera is porting Quartus to "Qt", and that one runs fine on all major OSes (MSwin, Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris) Qt is the best invention after hot chocolate :)  --- Quote End ---    Yes, QT is great. I look forward to that release.

[Altera_Forum]

Sorry for reviving this thread (after >2 months of sleeping). By the way, I'm really interested how ston, sconsul, and kutenai can get Quartus to work on a Mac. 

 I am a fan of Solaris (sorry no offence to the Mac fans out there, this is just my preference), but it really helps all the other Unix fans (me included) if some of you can explain the steps in getting Quartus to work on other non-officially-supported Unix platforms. Actually, Altera no longer supports official POSIX-based Unixes listed by opengroup.org (this includes Mac, Solaris).  I am not sure what is meant "parallels" - is it some form of virtualization, such as VMWare in Windows, VirtualBox, or Solaris Containers? It will be very interesting to find out how to install Quartus on other Unix platforms without any form of virtualization. Probably you guys know something. :)

[Altera_Forum]

Oh yes, btw, have anyone here tried Quartus 10.0? I think it's been ported to Qt, but I'm not too sure.