I recently fired up the Altera software, Quartus II, and spent a little time porting the Marin SoC to the popular Cyclone II based DE2 board. There's no external memory support yet, but on-chip memory is working, and it looks like the on-chip bootloader is coming up properly. As usual …
Altera's Quartus tools include some special software to download bitstreams to their devices over USB (a DE-2 eval board, in my case). They require some tricky work to set up properly on Fedora - my dev host of choice. But you're in luck! I've packaged up an RPM that takes care …