Published on 19 August 2014 by Gilles Lasnier

The ALTERA QuartusII 14.0 has been released since two months now. If you have upgraded your environment and if you're using a recent Ubuntu 64 bits host (for example an Ubuntu 13.10 or 14.04 version) and Firefox as web browser, you may issue an error when using the Licences Setup tool provided by Quartus.

When clicking on one of the options provided by the Web Licence Update interface, nothing will happen even if Quartus has displayed the following message on the system console:

Info (291001): Opening Licensing section of the Altera website at https://www.altera.com/support/licensing/free_software/lic-q2web.jsp"

If you launch Quartus from a Terminal you may be able to see the following error message:

gil@ciele:~$ quartus --64bit
XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so: /home/gil/workstation/altera/14.0/quartus/linux64/libstdc++.so.6: version 'GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so)
Couldn't load XPCOM.

Mainly, the reason is that your system has a more up-to-date Glibc lib than the one provided by Quartus at altera/quartus/14.0/linux64.

You can check your system and see that the GLIBCXX_3.4.15 lib is present by using:

gil@ciele:~$ strings /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 | grep 'GLIBCXX'

One quick fix is to replace the one used by Quartus by the one coming from your system:

gil@ciele:~$ cd altera/quartus/14.0/linux64
gil@ciele:~$ mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.orig
gil@ciele:~$ ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6

Then relaunch your Quartus and access to the Altera's website licence page using the Licences Setup tool.

Dependencies:

• tool: Quartus 64-Bit Version 14.0.0 Build 200 06/17/2014 SJ Web Edition
• host: Ubuntu 14.04 64bits (x86_64)
• web browser: Firefox