I realized not long ago that the next RISC-V workshop is in November, which by my estimates, leaves me only three months to get a working prototype ready and running. That'd then give me maybe a month or so to get *software* running, or at least partially running enough to show development progress.

With my recent spat of issues, I lamented this was not possible to accomplish with my current capacity. This, of course, assumed I couldn't get WebPack ISE working so as to just use my Nexys-2 in the interim.

Well, late last night, while searching for something else on the Internet (as it happens), I found a site which described the very problem I was having. While his work-around ultimately differed from mine, we had one thing in common: a missing libQt_Network.so file. So after restoring this file and playing around with the command-line tools for a bit, I finally managed to get ISE's license management working, and now it looks like I'm back in business with the Nexys-2!!

Maybe there's still hope to see a Kestrel-3 live in the flesh yet. Here's hoping.

Steps I had to take:

1. Grab a copy of libQt_Network.zip from Xilinx' knowledge base and install the appropriate libraries contain therein in the appropriate places in /opt/Xilinx.
2. ISE at least now prints errors when trying to launch firefox for license management. It still could not launch Firefox on its own because it was not able to find libstdc++ 3.4.9 and 3.4.20 (why it would need both is beyond me). So, I manually created and downloaded a license.
3. I installed the license in $HOME/.Xilinx/Xilinx.lic . At this point, most tools worked. Well, almost. One last step I needed to do.
4. I found out that I also needed to source /opt/xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/settings64.sh before everything started working together seamlessly.

Still haven't tested downloading a bitstream to the Nexys-2 just yet. I hope to be able to do that sometime soon.