I wanted to be able to work on this project from home, so I went ahead and downloaded Xilinx ISE Webpack from http://www.xilinx.com. I run Linux (specifically Debian) as my primary OS, so I installed the Linux version of ISE. The install certainly could have gone smoother (it seems to be targeted more towards RedHat), but thanks to a bit of research I was able to get it running smoothly. Unfortunately, Digilent (the maker of the development board I’m using) only has a Windows version of their software for programming the FPGA. I thought I was out of luck and would have to develop on my machine and then use a Windows machine to actually program the FPGA. But, thanks to VMWare, that’s not a problem.

The only thing that I have really missed since I completely switched over to Linux about a year ago is Microsoft Office. Open Office just doesn’t do it for me 100% (especially given the amount of .doc and .docx files I get from professors here at RIT). So, I run VMWare Server with XP as a guest operating system to address that problem. This way, I don’t have to reboot to open a word document or write a paper. This is also useful as it allows me to run a bunch of other Windows-only applications without the any real hassle.

That’s definitely spiffy, but what’s even cooler is the ability to share physical hardware between the host and guest OS. I can map a USB controller to my guest OS that will give me the ability to use USB devices in my VM just as I would if I were running WIndows nativelly on the machine. Long story short – this nifty feature allows me to install Digilent’s programming software in Windows and program the FPGA without rebooting.