Background

I recently purchased a copy of “Retrocomputing with Clash” and ordered a Nexys 7. In order to program the FPGA, I needed to install Vivado.

The Problem

The issue appears at the very end of a long installation process. The installation stalls at “Generating installed device list” and gets stuck there on Debian 13. I googled around and found several references to people encountering this issue. The problem is that the Vivado installation process depends on an outdated libtinfo and libncurses that isn’t even available on Debian 13.

The Solution

I had to download packages from Debian 12 and install them to fulfill the requirements. The packages were libtinfo5 and libncurses5. Once installed, you have to delete the old Vivado installation directory and start the installation from the beginning. At least I couldn’t find a way to resume it with the 2025.2 version of the installer.