Altera OpenCL license

[Altera_Forum]

Our team has purchased an Altera license for Quartus Prime Professional 17.1 with Arria 10 boards. 

The license works perfectly well with OpenCL projects. When we try to build traditional HDL projects using "quartus_syn" directly, we get the following error: Error (19286): No license for family Arria 10 Error: Flow failed: ERROR: Current design not found  We have the license path set as "export LM_LICENSE_FILE=..." Build an OpenCL project via the "aoc" compiler calls "quartus_syn" behind the scene and it works fine. Why is "quartus_syn" not able to accept this license file when launched manually?

[Altera_Forum]

That is very strange. Can you synthesize from the GUI?

[Altera_Forum]

When I start the quartus GUI using "quartus --gui" on linux 16.04, I get an error message asking for the license. 

This is very strange, AOCL runs perfectly well in my environment and I can even see in the build logs that "quartus_syn" executed successfully during that process. Somehow, the license doesn't work when trying to access quartus tools outside AOCL (ie directly for native HDL designs).