ModelSim Linux installation

Here you will find an step by step tutorial on how to install ModelSim and fix the most common errors.

Once the program is installed, in order to execute it, you just need to move to you installation directory, and find the bin folder. In my case it was ~/intelFPGA/16.1/modelsim_ase/bin. Once you are in the bin folder, by executing the command ./vsim ModelSim should start running. In case you find any errors, scroll to the next section.

Common problems

As ModelSim seems to be 32 bits, you may need to install 386-32 bit libraries using:

Main problem

Unless you have not updated your Linux kernel in the last 3 years, you are most certain to encounter an error saying could not find ./../linux_rh60/vsim. To understand this (optional) you can open the file vsim and notice that in the if...elseif conditions, the default description points towards a folder for the Red Hat distro. In order to fix it, basically, you need to replace this as (opening the file as superuser):

Also, change the very first non-commented line to:

This little change should fix most of the errors.

Second main problem

In case running vsimleads to: ** Fatal: Read failure in vlm process (0,0), read here:

You probably need to build a new version of freetype, a font setting library and modify ModelSim to use it. You can download the source code for freetype here.

Most certainly, the above would give you an error looking like:

This is because you could be on a 64-bit system but you will also need the 32-bit versions of the libraries that it depends on:

This just about solves the dependency issues and compiler errors. Run the following inside freetype... folder.

Now, this should nicely compile and give you the libraries in the directory objs/.libs/. Now, move to the modelsim_ase folder (inside the model sim installation dir) and define the linkings.

Find, in the main sequence of execution, and not in the if statement, the line

and add the following line bellow:

Save the file, and try to execute the vsim script again.

Others problems