Xilinx Coolrunner II & Xubuntu
After a few days wait the Xilinx Coolrunner II kit arrived in the post. The Coolrunner is a CPLD which contains Macrocells, which are a step up from the basic gate array of a PLD and the XC2C256 on this board has 256 macrocells configured via an interconnect matrix. Xilinx provide a programming suite, ISE, which is available for Windows and Linux. However they don't directly support Ubuntu. Here is a brief howto to get the ISE running on Xubuntu. The main hurdle with the ISE is that it requires a USB driver, windrvr6, in order to use the Platform cable (DLC9G). However it is possible to configure Xubuntu to use libusb and to get the programming tool, iMPACT, to use this instead. 1.Install prerequisites.. apt-get fxload apt-get libusb 2. Configure the udev rules These load the correct hex file when the device is attached. jamesb@Jalapeno:~$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules # version 0003 SYSFS{idVendor}=="03fd", SYSFS{idProduct}=="00...