May 12, 2022

FPGA - Spartan 3E board - ISE software

As I finished up the ISE Webpack install, I ran into this cable driver business. The following is what I learned the first day after finishing the install.

What about this cable driver business?

First off, you might ask, "why am I having these problems?". First of all Xilinx ISE 14.7 dates from October, 2013, which is about 9 years ago at the time of this writing. Notes in the README for the Digilent adept runtime indicate it had limited testing with Centos 6 back at that time. The current CentOS version is 8 -- so if that doesn't explain why things don't "just work", I am not sure what will.

I have to run "updatedb ; locate install.log" to find it, but it leads me to the log file they mention at: "/u1/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/.xinstall/install.log"

Almost everything seemed to go right about installing the cable drivers, with the exception of: 

Installing hotplug script.....
error: failed to install hotplug script "/etc/hotplug/usb/digilentusb"
error: failed to install Adept Runtime, exitcode = 4
See "/tools/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/digilent/digilent.adept.runtime_2.13.1-x86_64/README" for information regarding installation.
Using "locate" again to search for "digilentusb" yields: 
/u1/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin/digilent/digilent.adept.runtime_2.13.1-i686/digilentusb
/u1/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin64/digilent/digilent.adept.runtime_2.13.1-x86_64/digilentusb
/u1/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin/digilent/digilent.adept.runtime_2.13.1-i686/digilentusb
/u1/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/digilent/digilent.adept.runtime_2.13.1-x86_64/digilentusb
After a bit of exploring I discover a bash script to do the digilent adept install and run it by hand (it declares that it can have an argument givine the base path for the ISE install, but if you just run it, it will prompt for things. 
su
cd /u1/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/digilent/
./install_digilent.sh
Oddly enough, it works. And it never did prompt to ask what the base path for the install was.
Why did it not work when run by the official install scheme? Who knows.
Are there extra subsequent parts of the install that follow this "cable driver" business that got skipped?
Who knows.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org