This board has a Xilinx Spartan-6 on it. So in essence, when you buy a board you have already purchased the hardware from Xilinx. So it's nice to see they have a free IDE called Vivado.

But when you go to download it you get the shakedown about non-export and what your corporate address and application are. These are mandatory fields you must fill in before download the software. I haven't done a thing with the hardware yet and I already have a sour taste in my mouth.

IMPORTANT: Don't Install Vivado as Spartan-6 is not supported

Getting the Vivado installer running on Ubuntu

Installer crashes on Ubuntu. This thread yields the following commands which are a workaround.

chmod +x Xilinx_Vivado_SDK_2014.2_0612_1_Lin64.bin

./Xilinx_Vivado_SDK_2014.2_0612_1_Lin64.bin --target Xilinx_Install_temp<br>

cd Xilinx_Install_temp

Now edit the xsetup file and replace "#!/bin/sh" with "#!/bin/bash"

sudo ./xsetup

Now the GUI setup window will launch. I didn't run as sudo the first time and a couple of screens in the GUI complains about write permisisons for /opt/Xilinx.

9.18 GB

Check that download size and disk space. I'm trying to blink and LED and I've got a 1.89 GB download standing in my way? Maybe this is commonplace for the FPGA crowd, but I'm a fan of programming for embedded using a text editor and makefile (okay, I do use Eclipse more regularly these days but you know what I'm talking about).

As I said above, this does me no good because I have a Spartan-6 I'm trying to work with. I'll post another log on how to install ISE Design Suite.