Rybka 3 is out at a price of 36 €. This engine is very strong, we all know that. But be aware that for a very small extra fee you can get the Aquarium interface.
I only ordered from Shareit the engine (big mistake). Then noticed that the Aquarium interface was really interesting and the demo version worked very well under Linux with Wine (windows emulator). I contacted chessOK (Aquarium distributor) and they offered to get Aquarium for only 9 € and they are very helpful and reactive.
So :
- Aquarium+rybka package is really worthwile
- for only 45 € you get the strongest engine available, a nice interface and a lot of extras downloadable (many books, huge databases, ...)
- Rybka works with latest Scid
- all this works under Linux (at least for me, some others had more trouble)
I can make Rybka 3 run (with Aquarium or SCID or Chessbase GUI) under Linux (I tried both OpenSuSE 11.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 (both 32-bit and 64-bit)).
However, I am unable to set hash table size to more than 32 MB on my 1 GB system without causing severe disk thrashing. And no, it's NOT swapping! I've verified that with numerous Linux tools. There is some sort of writing going on by Rybka-3 and Linux/Wine see this as physical disk I/O. I'm not sure what it thinks it is writing to, but the disk I/O and waiting for I/Os to clear from the kernel (I/O Wait time) are very real and the engine during this time gets about 0.5 Kn/sec (not a typo) on my 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 system.
Others have not been able to reproduce this; I can do so at will on no less than 4 different systems running different Linux e flavors. I hope in the end it is something I'm doing wrong and someone can show me where I'm being dumb. I've bumped up shmmax to 1,000,000,000 and still no difference (some thought that may be the issue).
Note that none of this happened with Rybka 2.3.2a (32 or 64 bit) on my systems -- that software behaves beautifully. I'm still going to run Rybka-3 with 32 MB Hash on Linux as that should be about 50 ELO stronger than Rybka 2.3.2a with whatever amount of hash I choose to pick (512 MB was common on my 1 GB system with no issues as Linux is so memory efficient). However it is a flaw on the masterpiece created by Vas and Larry (at least for me -- hopefully not for others).
You can run a Rybka-3 32-bit engine under a 64-bit Linux by just installing wine (not microwine -- that is only for 64-bit engines running under 64-bit Linux).
You get the speed-up of a 64-bit Linux but not the speed-up of a 64-bit engine.
It works just fine (but I cannot make hash tables more than 32 MB as previously noted -- you may be luckier than I was on this as most seem to be).
