linux and computer chess

[hawkeye]

I have recently dual booted my laptop. I have windows vista and mepis linux 8. I was wondering why it is that i have downloaded scid via synaptic and for some reason the engines included in the package do not seem to work. Any suggestions? Thanks,

Steve

[bob]

I have recently dual booted my laptop. I have windows vista and mepis linux 8. I was wondering why it is that i have downloaded scid via synaptic and for some reason the engines included in the package do not seem to work. Any suggestions? Thanks,

Steve

If you open a terminal/xterm window, and type the name of one of those engines, what kind of error do you get? You might need 32 bit libs, or 64 bit libs, or they might be compiled for the wrong processor. Or any of a dozen other issues.

[krazyken]

could be a bug in the package, I haven't tried mepis, but you should check on their mailing list, as well as the scid mailing list.

[hawkeye]

Thanks for the input. I was not sure if i should post this here or on the linux forums. I thought I could get more help here since I knew there were a number of linux users here on the forum. Thanks again,


Steve

[royb]

I use Ubuntu and SCID but I downloaded SCID from sourceforge directly and did not use the version included in the Ubuntu repositories. You might try that ...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scid/

Roy

[hawkeye]

Thanks I had not thought of that.I was even thinking of using the jose database. I know that I could download the source for that as well. Thanks again,

Steve

[royb]

Thanks I had not thought of that.I was even thinking of using the jose database. I know that I could download the source for that as well. Thanks again,

Steve

It's been a long time since I tried to use Jose, but about 2 years ago it was fairly buggy and crashed a fair amount. I'm not sure if that is still being actively developed or not; if it is, it may be much better now.

I still prefer SCID but that's just me perhaps.

Roy

[krazyken]

Thanks I had not thought of that.I was even thinking of using the jose database. I know that I could download the source for that as well. Thanks again,

Steve

It's been a long time since I tried to use Jose, but about 2 years ago it was fairly buggy and crashed a fair amount. I'm not sure if that is still being actively developed or not; if it is, it may be much better now.

I still prefer SCID but that's just me perhaps.

Roy

Jose hasn't been updated since 2006. SCID is pretty awesome and under active development. The developers have responded to my feature requests quite readily.

[hawkeye]

I just downloaded the tarball and will build and compile later. I am new to linux so please wish me luck.

[glorfindel]

If the engines are the only thing not working, maybe the person who packages scid for Debian has disabled them. The same is happening with my distribution. The reason is probably that the engines are already available as separate packages.

There is a little problem: scid has a patched (modified) version of Phalanx so that one can play a "tactical game" against it, and this feature will not work with the unpatched version which is included in debian (and other) repositories. It is useful if you play against the computer and want to tweak its strength. There are alternatives, like UCI engines which support the UCI_limit_strength option, or crafty compiled with -DSKILL enabled.

If you want to use scid's engines, you can compile the engines only, and install scid from your package manager (Synaptic?), because this is the right way to do it (it gets updated together with the other packages, you can remove it easily, etc.)

So you can do this: download scid source code, go to the Phalanx directory, compile it ($> cd scid/engines/phalanx-scid and $> make), move the executable phalanx-scid to the folder you keep your engines, and add the engine to scid the usual way. You need gcc for this.

You can do the same for Toga, but I see no reason to use Scid's version. It is not a special or patched version, so you can use any other engine for analysis, including perhaps a toga from your package manager. And from the Toga family I prefer The Mad Prune, because it has Multi-PV working - I have found it here.

Good luck.