How to install Simics on Ubuntu when the install guide fails?

Question

I'm installing simics on ubuntu as my new semester requires (currently using a virtual machine via virtual box, in case this is part of the issue), however I'm extremely new to linux. The install guide provided by intel (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/simics-simulator-installation.html) says this;

1. Unpack tar file

2. Open unpacked file, run the package manager by running ispm-gui from the unpacked directory, if that doesn't work, run ispm-gui --no-sandbox

And that's where I hit a stop, despite trying to run ispm-gui, it keeps throwing me an error:

ispm command not found

After digging I tried installing the packages mentioned on How to install Intel Simics from the CLI? only to crash into a similar error.

bash: ./ispm: no such file or directory 

I ran this command from within the same folder it was unpacked and from home, the guide does not seem to provide an alternative way of installing. Can't really find much discussion about this so I can only think that I need to install something obvious to preemptively recognize the ispm but I cannot think or find anything about it.

Answer 1

In both cases you system cannot find the ispm executable. In the first case it is using your global search path in the PATH environment variable and in the second case it is looking for it in the current working directory. Use the pwd command to find out what that is.

The tar-file likely put the files in a subdirectory. Then you have to either change your current working directory to that folder using the cd command, or you can simply replace the initial dot, in your second command above, with the proper path to the executable. It is likely that the directory path is something like intel-simics-package-manager (maybe with some version too), but you can probably find the exact name using ls in the current folder assuming that is where you unpacked the tar-ball.

Answer 2

If you are not familiar with Linux, run the software on Windows instead. That works precisely the same.

Essentially, on Linux:

• Download the ispm-...linux64.tar.gz
• Unpack the tar file
• cd into the created directory, and run the ispm-gui program from there (./ispm-gui &)
• Download the simics-6-...ispm file
• Point the ispm GUI at the bundle as instructed

Updated: the web page has been fixed, this is no longer an issue: Point 3 in the instructions has a broken indent. It should be below point 2.