I recently started learning the Verilog hardware description language, and was bewildered by the size and complexity of the major commercial EDA offerings. They’re huge, expensive, Windows-based, GUI-driven monsters packed with quirks and features, aimed at teams of commercial engineers with dedicated IT staff. I’m sure they’re very useful, but they’re very imposing to somebody who just wants to compile and run Verilog testbenches. Baby steps.
One alternative is Icarus Verilog. Icarus is a tiny, free, command-line driven Verilog compiler and simulator targeted for Linux. According to the site, it’s written to Verilog 2005 (IEEE Standard 1364-2005). It’s available in recent Ubuntu, and in any event, can be easily built from source. Getting started is dead simple. Install Icarus, enter your Verilog design into text-format .v source files using your favorite editor, and compile it using the iverilog binary.
$ iverilog -o foobar foo.v bar.v $ ./foobar [output ...]
More examples and free EDA to follow.