Solution

You must install the libusb 1.0 package on your machine to be able to use the Digilent cable on the Linux platform. If your Linux distribution does not provide a package for libusb 1.0, the package must be downloaded and built.

Testing for the libusb 1.0 Installation

The libusb 1.0 package might be installed with your Linux distribution. To test whether this is the case:

1. Check iflibusb 1.0 is installed using the distribution's package manager.

2. Check if the library is recognized by the system's dynamic loader, by checking that the output of the following command is a non-zero count.

/sbin/ldconfig -p | grep libusb-1 -c

Installing the libusb Package

Note: The current version of libusb 1.0 is 1.0.8. If necessary, substitute a newer version in the following steps. Root permission is not required to perform this installation.

1. Download the package from: http://www.libusb.org/.

2. Open a shell or terminal console.

3. Extract the libusb package script and its support files by typing: tar xzvf libusb-1.0.8.tar.bz2. This will create a directory named "libusb-1.0.8" in the current directory. Note if the previous command did not properly extract the tar file, run:

bunzip2 libusb-1.0.8.tar.bz2
tar xvf libusb-1.0.8.tar

4. Navigate to the "libusb-1.0.8" directory by typing:

cd libusb-1.0.8

5. Run the configure script. Running ./configure script without any argument installs the libusb shared libraries to the "/usr/local" directory. Root permission is required to be able to write to this directory. If root permission is not available, run the configure script with the --prefix argument.

./configure --prefix=<install-dir>

where <install_dir> is a directory where the libusb shared libraries will be installed, and this directory can be owned by a regular user.

6. Run the following commands to complete the installation:

make
make install (can also be run from a root account)

7. Make sure libusb 1.0 package can be loaded by the Digilent cable software.

If the package was installed from a root account, the you can either update the LD_LBRARY_PATH environment variable (discussed below) or create a text file containing "/usr/local/lib", the default path for the libusb shared libraries, in /etc/ld.so.conf.d directory and then execute:

/sbin/ldconfig

8. Update the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, if necessary, to point to the libusb shared libraries. If the installation was performed from a root account, make sure that the "/usr/local/lib" directory is included in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. If the installation was performed from a regular user's account, add the "<install_dir>/lib" to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

For the C shell:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH <install_dir>/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

For theBourne shell:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<install_dir>/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Your login script can also be modified to add the libusb shared library location to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to be able to make libusb 1.0 available all the time and after system reboots.