SLES 11 Download Installation by Command Line

Altera_Forum · ‎10-04-2012

I was working with a command-line system trying to install Quartus 12.0 sp2. Took a bunch of work, but it is possible, regardless of what the conflicting documentation says.

You can also choose which families of devices to install as well.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of annoying bugs in the installation frame work.

My hope is that someone from the Quartus install team will notice this and fix it for future versions of the Linux installer.

First install the following packages (this is SLES 11 64bit)

zypper install subversion git-svn terminfo findutils-locate xorg-x11-libXext-32bit freetype2-32bit fontconfig-32bit

Download the latest installer (Quartus 12.0sp2 Build 263 is the one I used)

Subscription Edition, and Option 1, Download Manager

Now you have to de-screw up the download manager. As it forces the gui to be run after self extracting. Why? There is no reason for this Altera, provide an option flag for this at least.

sh altera_installer.external.sh --noexec --target altera_installer/bin
#  Just extract the installer, do not autorun the install
ln -s altera_installer/bin/setup .
#  Create a symlink, according to strace the only sane way to run the installer manually
vim ./setup#  Yup, editing time

Line 108 of the setup script, note the new and old lines below.


if test $CMD_NAME = "setup" ; then
        export CMD_NAME="altera_installer_cmd"#  New Line
       # export CMD_NAME="altera_installer_cmd --source=$ROOTDIR"#  Old Line
        LOG="$(mktemp /tmp/altera_setup.log.XXXXXXXXXX)"
       #  no args; default to GUI install based on root directory type

The reason for this change, is that it forces you to install Quartus from a directory that already contains all of the files that you *want* to download. Why is this option forced as a default? There is no reason for this, and it just limits the flexibility (since you can set the --source option manually anyways...).

Finally:

# Finally, run the download manager
#  Something to keep in mind, it is possible to save the downloads and use them later
#  And yes the '"super"' quotes on the next line are required
./setup --net --target=/visvc/12.0sp2 --full -i quartus --families='"Stratix III/IV and HardCopy III/IV, Stratix V"'

Notice the '" quotes around the family names. These are required (as setup requires the double quotes, and have to tell bash to keep the double quotes or else they will be stripped before being sent as arguments to ./setup)

Setting up the license, is just a matter of setting up the ~/.altera.quartus file.

Again, my hope is that some Altera employee will see this, and submit a bug to get this fixed for a future release.