I, like others, am a little upset by the lack of a free (ISE Webpack) version of impact for GNU/Linux.
As discussed in an earlier thread impact will not run under wine, it will not access the parallel port. However it can be made to produce SVF files.
Using information from XAPP188 I was able to configure the Xilinx Spartan3 Starter Kit (the FPGA, not the Flash yet).
I am not able to compare the speed with impact, but I can tell you that I configured a xc3s200 in about 4.3 seconds.
This software is at it's early stage of development and I have only tested it on the Xilinx Spartan3 Starter Kit. It doesn't need to run as root since it uses /dev/parport0. Oh, it doesn't need its own kernel module driver either, unlike some programs!
With ISE WebPack running on wine and now being able to configure the FPGA from GNU/Linux, do we have a complete tool chain for GNU/Linux that is free?
Regards Andrew Rogers