[Fpga-synth] Inexpensive development environment

[Eric Brombaugh]

Slightly OT -

A few weeks back I picked up an ASUS EEE PC 900A a local big-box 
electronic store: 1.6GHz Intel Atom, 1GB DRAM, 4GB SDD, WiFi, Xandros 
Linux. $200 (!). Xandros Linux was poorly configured and had to go, but 
Ubuntu eee (Now called Easy Peasy) works nicely.

I downloaded Xilinx ISE Webpack 10.1.03 for Linux onto a desktop 
machine, stripped out the documentation, Coregen, VHDL (not my language) 
and a lot of the unused FPGA/CPLD families. This brought the total 
install size down to 1.9GB - sufficiently small to fit onto a 2GB SD 
card which fits in an available slot on the EEE. I also grabbed a 
tarball of the arm-elf-gcc toolchain and installed that onto the main 
4GB SDD. For board design I've installed free gEDA & PCB tools. For ARM 
download/debug I've got the Olimex JTAG-USB-TINY and openocd. All that's 
missing is an open-source FPGA download capability.

I've now got a portable full-up ARM + FPGA + board design environment 
for a total investment of less than $250.

Beat that!

Eric