EDA tools in Ubuntu 12.04: Unsupported version

While moving to 12.04 LTS I noticed some of my EDA tools did not work properly. For example Synopsys Synplify G-2012.09 works out of the box (but is buggy with respect to Synopsys Identify). Former versions did even start, with the following error message:

*****************************************************************

Warning: You are running on an unsupported platform
'synplify_premier' only supports unknown

current platform: unknown 3.2.0-33-generic

*****************************************************************

************************************************************

Error: Could not find /nfs/tools/synopsys/fpga/F-2012.03/unknown/mbin/synplify

************************************************************


Okay, looks quite straight forward. You will face the same issue with Mentor Modelsim for example. The reason is quite simple, namely that Linux has moved from Kernel 2.6.x that has been around for many years now to 3.x and moves much faster. In Synplify there is for example a F-2012.03/bin/config/platform_check file that checks the kernel version to fit as:

case $PLATFORM in
solaris | linux | solaris_64 | linux_a_64 )
case $VERSION in
5.*)
fullsubver=`echo $VERSION | sed s/5\\\.//`
numsubver=`echo $fullsubver | sed -e 's/[^0-9].*//'`
if [ $numsubver -gt 8 ]; then
PLATFORM_STATUS="ok";
else
PLATFORM_STATUS=`echo $PLATFORM $VERSION`;
fi;;
2.4.* | 2.6.* )
PLATFORM_STATUS="ok";;
*)
PLATFORM_STATUS=`echo $PLATFORM $VERSION`;;
esac;;
*)
PLATFORM_STATUS=`echo $PLATFORM $VERSION`
;;
esac

Apparently this does not match Kernel 3.2 and the others. Just add 3.* to the list or even disable the platform check entirely in the synplify wrapping script itself..