I wonder if anyone here are in the same situation as me. I am think of buying a new PC, but wondering if I should wait for Windows Vista become available first. Have anyone try running FPGA tools (Xilinx Webpack, Modelsim XE, Quartus, Cygwin) on Windows Vista beta? Does it work okay? Or should I get a "Vista capable" PC now and upgrade later? (sound too much hassle to me, but it might be better?) Thanks.
Have to agree with pbdel, Vista is a giant piece of whatever.
If W2k or XP or Linux works well already what possible reason could there be to add the extra burden that Vista imposes. From what I hear, Vista takes more things away like your right to rebuild your hardware the way you like, it locks things up with more DRM and more restrictions on changing your base.configuration. It also uses far more resources to do the same job even without the Aero candy.
Still we will have to deal with Vista eventually, shame that MS wants to make W2K go away and then XP when they are working just fine.
You can turn off much of Vista's eye candy which takes quite a bit of cpu cycles. In addition the main saving grace of Vista is that it has a 64 bit version where ISE and other tools (I've tried ISE 8.2 under
64 bit Vista) get a full 4G adress space so if your design doesn't fit to 2G but fits 4G you're still in luck.
You do not have to wait for Vista to get 64 bits. WinXP64 is available today and works just fine. One advantage of WinXP64 is that 32 bit Windows Apps have access to 4GB of address space. On the WinXP32 32 bit Windows applications have access to at most 3GB of memory, if the application is linked with a special flag.
MS will use you as a beta tester and charge you for the pleasure. Better upgrade in the summer or next christmas when other ppl have suffered the initial bugs ;)
Btw, there's always the Linux way.. :p (No forced upgrades & virus headaches)
It will take more than 1 year for this to happen. And anti-virus companies are locked out from Vista (so I read). So they may have an incentive to keep MS-XP running for a long time even if MS halt updates.
Tell them XP or I don't know. I wouldn't let them tell me what enviroment I should run.
It depend more on Xilinx than MS.. As long as Xilinx don't bother with Vista you won't have to either.
My MacPro has booted into OS X 3 times - once to run Bootcamp and twice to do system software updates; it's been running XP ever since. The latest beta of Parallels lets you run the Windows installed on the Bootcamp partition. Previous versions required a separate install. Unfortunately in this mode, Windows must be reauthorized whenever switching between Parallels and Bootcamp. When there is a release version of Parallels that runs the Bootcamp Windows, I'll probably try it.
There is also CrossOver Mac
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which is a WINE port. One user reports some ISE 8.2 compatibility. Of course, what we really need is a Mac port of the Xilinx tools.
Yup. Using Altera Quartus 6.x and an fpga4fun.com Pluto-II (Cyclone board). Mac Pro quad-Xeon w/ OSX 10.4.8 and XP-SP2 under Parallels.
Using a Prolific PL-2303 USB-serial adapter to program the FPGA board, installed the Windows drivers into the virtual XP machine under Parallels, and enabled visibility of the USB device so Windows could pick it up as a COM port. The fpga4fun FpgaConfig tool works fine through this arrangement. I've not done anything using a USB-JTAG pod, or anything like that yet.
Parallels' "Coherence" mode is really good for this, where the two desktops are visually co-mingled [1][2]. You have to see it, it works very well. Much better than just "Windows in a window", esp. on a big display.
I'm also using the shared folder mode and keeping all my project files in a folder outside of the XP disk image, so if I want to do lengthy editing in BBEdit (or invoke BSD tools in OS X), the files are directly accessible in both environments.
One thing I have not tried since I don't have a Boot Camp bootable partition, is the newer Parallels mode where it can run such a partition as a VM.
Rob
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I am in no way an expert on this topic, but my limited understanding (based on Google Group searches) is that Linux programs run on FreeBSD using the Linux compatibility layer, but the Linux compatibility layer doesn't really work on OS X.
No. Windows Vista won't do any better for FPGA development than XP. Likely it will just create new hassles. Stick with what's known to work.
Personally, I much prefer Linux. I'm now using WebPACK 9.2i on Fedora Core 6, and it works great, so I expect that the full ISE 9.2i should be fine also.
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