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The permanent version of this post - with comments (if any) - is at
http://sensicomm.blogspot.com/2015/10/lattic-icecube2-on-debian.html

Lattic iCEcube2 on Debian

I recently started looking at Lattice chips for a project that needs a fairly small FPGA. They have small devices that are significantly lower in cost than the larger Xilinx Spartan chips I've used in the past. To explore further, I ordered the ICE40HX1K eval board ($22) and downloaded the free iCEcube2 IDE for my Debian stable(Jessie) 64-bit PC.
The first try at installing the IDE hit issues:
 error while loading shared libraries: libXext.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
The library is installed, so obviously the IDE wants the 32-bit version. I haven't tried to work with 32-bit stuff since Debian went to the multiarch approach, so that led to a new learning experience. Previously one would install ia32 versions of the needed libraries. After a bit of googling, I found that the current approach is (as root, or using sudo):
dpkg --add-architecture i386 # Include 32-bit stuff
apt-get update  # Add in the lists of 32-bit packages.
apt-file search libXext.so.6 # Find out what package I need - libxext6 in this case.
apt-get install libxext6:i386 # Add the 32-bit version of thepackage.
Now, the install fails because it's missing libpng12.so.0, so repeat the apt-file search and apt-get install steps for that. In Total I ended up installing  libpng12-0:i386, libsm6:i386, libxi6:i386, libxrender1:i386, libxrandr2:i386, libxfixes3:i386, libxcursor1:i386, libxinerama1:i386, libfreetype6:i386, libfontconfig1:i386, libglib2.0-0:i386.
With that, iCEcube2 installs and runs.

Now I can start playing with the eval board when it shows up.


Notes:

hackaday.io/project/6592-dipsy/log/24272-installing-icecube-2-on-ubuntu-14042-lts  Pointed me in the right direction to complete the install. Their Dipsy project uses the Lattice chip, and looks interesting.

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