Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Timothy Miller wrote:
>
> For their smaller devices, Xilinx has a free "WebPack" which is a 
> complete Verilog synthesizer (I don't know if it does VHDL), as well as 
> place & route, of course.  I think it'll do up to Virtex II 250.  It 
> also tends use fewer gates for a given design than the version of 
> Leonardo Spectrum we have.  It just doesn't have a simulator, which is 
> vital to any good development process.  Also, the Web Pack only runs 
> under Windows.  Maybe it'll work with WINE?

It does work with wine - but it's sad how horrible the command line tools
are (they were apparently first done under UNIX, and then ported to 
Windows, and they got the Windows command line interface and trying to use 
them in a sane way with Wine is not exactly much fun).

But yes, with Wine and a few scripts you can actually make the tools 
usable under Linux - I tried them out and had a small silly "pong" game 
running on one of those things (a 100k device on one of the cheap 
development boards).

I have to admit that I would hate to actually use those tools for any real 
work, though. 

			Linus