Making ModelSim vsim and Questa vco work on Ubuntu 14.04

In my previous article, http://mattaw.blogspot.com/2014/05/making-modelsim-altera-starter-edition.html, I covered how to install and run the ModelSim-ALTERA starter edition on Ubuntu 14.04.

Subsequently it turns out this fix also applies to Mentor Graphic's ModelSim and Mentor Graphic's Questa (not that surprising as Questa is a superset of ModelSim with far greater capabilities).

The previous instructions for ModelSim ALTERA work for ModelSim.

Here are the detailed instructions to apply the fix to Questa:

Firstly complete installing everything including compiling the new libfreetype libraries and copying them into the questasim directory.

Now we need to edit the vco launch script to ensure the new freetype libraries are used:

sudo vim bin/vco

Search for the following line:

dir=`dirname $arg0`

and underneath add the following new line:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${dir}/lib32

Test by running vco and hopefully you will be greeted by the Questa GUI.

Please email me any fixes or changes you would like so I can update this post and give credit.