Installing Ubuntu - 12.04 -> 14.04
There are two supported versions of Linux you can install on the DE1. The first coming from Terasic, and the other from the Intel University Program (Intel UP).
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Terasic Ubuntu 16.04: This image assumes that there is a VGA subsystem present on the FPGA and so requires a VGA monitor when setting it up. This can be problem if you want to get up and running quickly and don’t have a monitor.
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Intel UP Ubuntu 12.04: This image makes use of the built in UART to USB chip on the HPS and starts a new shell after the kernel has finished booting. It doesn’t use the VGA Subsystem by default. This makes it way easier to get up and running quickly. For this reason, I chose to use the Intel image.
The remote repositories for 12.04 are no longer online, so upgrading the distro to 14.04 (trusty) is usually the first thing I do.
Installing 12.04 is relatively simple. Download the image from Intel from here and follow the installation instructions from Intel here.
N.B: Intel serves all of their FPGA material through an FTP server (ftp://ftp.intel.com/Pub/fpgaup/pub/Intel_Material) which I find easier to navigate than their website.
Once Ubuntu is running and connected to the internet, you can update the sources.list file so that it points to the trusty repositories.
# replace "precise" with "trusty"
$ sed -i 's/precise/trusty/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
# replace 1st occurrence of "ports" with "old-releases.ports"
$ sed -i 's/ports/old-releases.ports/1' /etc/apt/sources.list
The first line of sources.list should now look like:
deb http://old-releases.ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ trusty main ...
At this point, it should be ready to upgrade. I’ve had problems running apt-get dist-upgrade in the past as it usually wants to remove some packages
(which causes instability down the line), so I decided to just run a regular upgrade.
$ apt-get -f upgrade
This shouldn’t remove any packages and will upgrade most packages to their trusty versions.