Development machine

The following are the instructions for installing a virtual machine with Debian 13 (amd64) and Vitis Core Development Kit 2025.2.

Creating virtual machine with Debian 13 (amd64)

• Download and install VirtualBox

• Download mini.iso for Debian 13

• Start VirtualBox

• Set the experience level to "Expert":

  • From the "File" menu, select "Preferences"

  • Click "Expert"

  • Click "OK"

• Create at least one host-only interface:

  • From the "File" menu, select "Tools" and then "Network Manager"

  • Click the green "Create" icon

• Create a new virtual machine:

  • From the "Machine" menu, select "New"

  • In the "Name and Operating System" section, pick a name for the machine, then set type to "Linux" and subtype to "Debian"

  • In the "Hardware" section, set the memory size to at least 4096 MB

  • In the "Hard Disk" section, set the disk size to at least 256 GB

  • Click "Finish"

• Configure the newly created virtual machine:

  • Select the newly created virtual machine and click the yellow "Settings" icon

  • Select "Network" and enable "Adapter 2" attached to "Host-only Adapter"

  • Set "Adapter Type" to "Paravirtualized Network (virtio-net)" for both "Adapter 1" and "Adapter 2"

  • Select "System" and select only "Optical" in the "Boot Order" list

  • Select "Storage" and select "Empty" under "Controller: IDE"

  • Click the small CD/DVD icon next to the "Optical Drive" drop-down list, select "Choose a Disk File", navigate to the location of the mini.iso image, select it, and click "Open"

  • Click "OK"

• Select the newly created virtual machine and click the green "Start" icon

• Press TAB when the installer menu appears

• Edit the boot parameters at the bottom of the boot screen to make them look like the following:

  (the content of the bit.ly/2GH2YHy installation script can be seen at this link)

linux initrd=initrd.gz url=bit.ly/2GH2YHy auto=true priority=critical interface=auto

• Press ENTER to start the automatic installation

• After installation is done, stop the virtual machine

• Select the newly created virtual machine and click the yellow "Settings" icon

• Select "System" and select only "Hard Disk" in the "Boot Order" list

• Click "OK"

• The virtual machine is ready to use (the default password for the root and red-pitaya accounts is changeme)

Accessing the virtual machine

The virtual machine can be accessed via SSH. To display applications with graphical user interfaces, a X11 server (Xming for MS Windows or XQuartz for Mac OS X) should be installed on the host computer. X11 forwarding should be enabled in the SSH client.

Installing Vitis Core Development Kit

• Download "AMD Unified Installer for FPGAs & Adaptive SoCs 2025.2 SFD" from the Xilinx download page (the file name is FPGAs_AdaptiveSoCs_Unified_SDI_2025.2_1114_2157.tar)

• Create the /opt/Xilinx directory, unpack the installer and run it:

mkdir /opt/Xilinx
tar -xf FPGAs_AdaptiveSoCs_Unified_SDI_2025.2_1114_2157.tar
cd FPGAs_AdaptiveSoCs_Unified_SDI_2025.2_1114_2157
./xsetup

• Follow the installation wizard

• Set the installation directory to /opt/Xilinx

Troubleshooting

In recent releases of Linux distributions, the packages libncurses5 and libtinfo5 required by vivado and xsct may be missing, resulting in the following error messages when running these programs:

libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A possible workaround would be to run the following commands, that download and install these packages from an older Debian release:

wget http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/n/ncurses/libncurses5_6.4-4_amd64.deb
wget http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/n/ncurses/libtinfo5_6.4-4_amd64.deb
apt-get install ./libncurses5_6.4-4_amd64.deb ./libtinfo5_6.4-4_amd64.deb