Installation instructions for Quartus

I know how much a pain it is to set up and make this software run correctly, so I am thinking of sumarizing how to get it working on a Linux VM, for those who are having problems with it and for next year students. The reason for using a Linux VM is because the software (especially Nios) is much, much faster than on Windows (not tested on Mac).I will be using VMWare Player (free) for this. Other virtual machines should work, too. The Linux distro shouldn't matter, either. The only distro I was unable to get it working on was Mint. As of writing, Fedora 16 & 17 didn't work properly.
I am not going to cover how to use VMWare Player as it should be self explanatory.

So first, install a Linux distro.
Then, download Quartus from https://www.altera.com/download/software/quartus-ii-we. I downloaded the full quartus 2 free edition at 4.6 GB for Linux. The subscription edition works too, but you have to have a KTH IP to use it.

Unpack the archive using your favorite method (most distro have a GUI for it). Or, if you downloaded the small Linux setup, run it (sudo ./altera_installer.external.sh).
If you unpacked the archive (4.6 GB version), browse to the directory you unpacked it and run setup as root (sudo /.setup) [use a terminal].

Install Quartus as usual using the GUI. For this course, we use Cyclone IV E (at least this course round). No other device families are necessary. For embedded software, the Cyclone II family is used.

Now, for some reason, the installer does not install the necessary dependencies for the Eclipse IDE to run properly, so in a terminal, run

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libxtst6:i386

(Switch apt-get to yum as necessary depending on your distro.)

Now, for some reason, the installer also fails to set a necessary environment variable, called SOPC_KIT_NIOS2. So in a terminal, write

export SOPC_KIT_NIOS2=<path_to_where_you_installed>/nios2eds

Finally, we must connect the USB blaster to the virtual machine. You can do that by right-click on the usb icon in the vmware toolbar and selecting connect. This may not work if the board is connected to a USB3 port (I had trouble with it), so if you get an error, trying using a USB2 port.

If you can't find USB Blaster (or any other usb devices) in the toolbar, make sure the VMware USB Arbitration Service is running.

Now you should be all set. You can start Quartus by typing $SOPC_KIT_NIOS2/../quartus/bin/quartus in a terminal, and Nios 2 by $SOPC_KIT_NIOS2/bin/eclipse-nios2.

Some final notes:
You can share your filesystem from your computer with your VM. To do that, install the VMWare tools (Player->Manage->Install VMWare Tools). Accept the defaults with the installation.
Also beware that there seems to be some bug when using Eclipse and creating projects in your shared path. At least, it failed for me. It worked fine when I tried to use the Home folder.

I sure hope this saves someone else a lot of frustration as it did me.