Setup Xilinx ISE 14.1 (Free Version) and Digilent’s Adept Utilities in Fedora 17 64-bit

Hello everybody! As promised in the previous post, I’m going to show you how to setup the tools you’ll need to work with Digilent’s FPGA boards. This tutorial is also helpful if you want to use Xilinx ISE in Fedora. It is possible to program a number of boards (including the Nexys3 which I have) directly from Xilinx.

There was no real problem for me for most of the installation phase. Things worked great till the cable drivers installation. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t work. After searching a lot online, I saw that this is a problem on RedHat and Centos as well (please correct me if I am wrong). After more searching, I found out how I can get things to work. I’m actually redoing the entire installation so that I don’t miss any step. So lets get started! 🙂

The first thing you’ll need to do is download the Xilinx Package. Head over to The Download Page and select “Full Installer for Linux”

(Note: Click the screenshots to view them at full size)

You’ll get redirected to a log-in page. In case you don’t have an account, click Create Account on the left side to create a new account. This part should be fairly obvious so I won’t go over it here. Once you have an account, go back to this page (you might have to go to the downloads page again), enter your login information and sign in. You’ll be asked for more details. Fill them up and click Next. You should now get a download request. Begin the download and wait for it to complete. It’s a 6GB package so it will take a long time (one whole day in my case).

Lets assume you’ve downloaded the package to ~/Downloads/. Open the terminal and untar (unpackage or decompress) the file you downloaded (The name of the package may differ depending on the version).

cd ~/Downloads
tar xvf Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_14.1_P.15xf.0.1.tar

This should create a new directory called Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_14.1_P.15xf.0.1. This will contain the setup files you will need to install Xilinx ISE. To begin setup, go into this directory and run the installer.

cd Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_14.1_P.15xf.0.1
./xsetup

If the second command does not work, type

chmod a+x xsetup
./xsetup

You should be greeted with the following screen:

Hit Next. You’ll now see a license agreement. Accept it and click next. You’ll see one more license agreement as well. Accept this one as well and click Next again. In the next screen, select the ISE WebPACK option and click Next.

You’ll see another screen where you can select installation options. Go with the default. Make sure that “Install Cable Drivers” is not selected as it isn’t going to work (we’ll fix it later). Click Next. You will now get to choose the installation directory. The default is /opt/Xilinx. I changed to a place I find convenient: ~/bin/Xilinx. I have other software such as scilab and sagemath installed here as well so it’s nice to have everything in one place. Change the directory if you want or leave it at the default. It shouldn’t matter. Click Next one last time.

You’ll see an options summary. Click Install. The installer will now unpack the files to the target installation directory. This can take a while (time for some ice cream :-)). When the installation is almost done, you’ll see a license manager open up. Select the “Get Free ISE WebPack License” option and click Next. You’ll see a dialog pop-up. Click Connect now.

Your browser will open and go to the Xilinx Website. Log in if you need to and you’ll see a page asking you to fill in your details once again. Luckily, you won’t need to because Xilinx remembers the details you entered the last time (i.e. before downloading the installer).

At this point, I’m not sure what will happen because I already requested a license once. In my case I get an option to request the same license again. Follow the instructions you see and post a question in the comments section in case you’re stuck. Once you request for the license, you’ll receive an email with the license file attached. Download this file and store it in a place you will remember. I kept mine the same place I installed Xilinx ISE. Click Copy license and point to the place where you’ve stored the license file. Once the License Manager accepts the license, you’ll see another dialog box. Click OK.

Now click Close to close the License Manager. The installer will tell you that the Installation is complete. Click Finish to exit the installer. Xilinx ISE is now installed. Now you will be able to open the Project Navigator and create new projects. You can add Verilog or VHDL code and generate BIT files (the files used to program the FPGA).

However, you will not be able to program the board. Remember we made sure we didn’t install the cable drivers before? We’ll have to do that now. The drives that ship with Xilinx do not compile and hence won’t work. We’ll need an alternative. I found the instructions for installing the USB cable driver (libusb-driver) in the following article:

Xilinx 11.4 on Fedora 12; Playing with Spartan 3e starter kit

Now here’s what you need to do. We need an alternate JTAG cable driver so we use libusb-driver. First we need to make sure we have the dependencies. Run:

sudo yum -y install fxload libusb-devel

Next we are going to get the driver’s source code and compile it. Run the following commands in the terminal:

git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver
cd usb-driver
make

Now copy the driver to your Xilinx installation. I used the command below. Remember that you’ll have to change it depending on where you installed Xilinx in the beginning.

cp libusb-driver.so ~/bin/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/common/lib/lin64/

Now for the driver to work, you’ll need to copy udev rules and the firmware for the JTAG.

cd ~/bin/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/install_script/install_drivers/linux_drivers/pcusb/
sudo cp xusbdfwu.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo cp *.hex /usr/share/

Now that the cable drivers are installed, we need to install the required plug-ins and utilities to get the Nexys3 to work. Run the following commands:

~/bin/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin64/digilent/
sudo ./install_digilent.sh

Hit the enter key each time the installation script asks you to confirm a directory (you can alternatively choose to change the directory. I used the defaults to be safe).

There is still one more problem we need to fix. Digilent’s script was written for an older version of udev (Linux’s device manager).  So by default, you’ll be able to use Digilent’s tools only as root. The script creates a udev rules file in /etc/udev/rules.d/. In my case the file was called 52-digilent-usb.rules.  Run the following  command:

sudo sed -i 's/SYSFS/ATTR/g' /etc/udev/rules.d/52-digilent-usb.rules

Please do check the name of the file. I’m not sure if it is 52-digilent-usb.rules for everyone. I got the above fix after contacting Digilent’s support.

Finally reload udev using the following command so that all these drivers work.

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

We’re nearly done. To use Xilinx ISE, we need to set a few environment variables and source a settings file. Open your favourite text editor and add the following:

#!/bin/sh
# Xilinx Webpack 14.1
XILINX_BASE="/home/ashwith/bin/Xilinx"
XILINX_VERSION="14.1"
DISPLAY=:0
export XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB=1
source ${XILINX_BASE}/${XILINX_VERSION}/ISE_DS/settings64.sh
${XILINX_BASE}/${XILINX_VERSION}/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin64/ise

Again, remember that your installation path will not be the same. Change the “XILINX_BASE” line accordingly. Save the file as startise (or any other name you like) and close the editor. We need to make this file an executable. Run the following:

chmod a+x startise

Now whenever you want to open the Xilinx ISE Project navigator, just run startise like so:

./startise

So that’s how you setup the environment for the Nexys3 FPGA board on Fedora 17 64-bit. I’m guessing this should work on other Digilent boards as well. Do let me know if you face any issues by posting in the comments section below. I’m no expert on this but I’ll try my best to help you out. Hope this was helpful. For my next post, we will program the board and see it in action! Keep checking back for that. Thanks for reading! 🙂