Linux and chess, revisited (for the chess player)

[Ponti]

Well, after a long time, finally my Manjaro distro installed in my old laptop crashed after an update. Well, thatś based on Arch, so it was to happen anyway (as I am not an advanced user).

Got back to my XP partition, which I use sometimes only because of Chessbase. Oh, well, Chessbase 12 is buggy as hell too. I can upgrade it, it crashes after upgrade.

I'm looking back to try other distros. I'm writing this with a Gobang distro - it's Ubuntu LTS with Openbox. I've tried to install SCID - no success. Tried Jin - no success too. If I can't use a chess database and ICC or FICS, it becomes a useless laptop. I use it to go to tournaments and prepare my games. For other things, I use my old Q6600 Win7 desktop, or Mac book.

Any suggestions of a good Linux "chess-friendly" distro ?

[royb]

Well, after a long time, finally my Manjaro distro installed in my old laptop crashed after an update. Well, thatś based on Arch, so it was to happen anyway (as I am not an advanced user).

Got back to my XP partition, which I use sometimes only because of Chessbase. Oh, well, Chessbase 12 is buggy as hell too. I can upgrade it, it crashes after upgrade.

I'm looking back to try other distros. I'm writing this with a Gobang distro - it's Ubuntu LTS with Openbox. I've tried to install SCID - no success. Tried Jin - no success too. If I can't use a chess database and ICC or FICS, it becomes a useless laptop. I use it to go to tournaments and prepare my games. For other things, I use my old Q6600 Win7 desktop, or Mac book.

Any suggestions of a good Linux "chess-friendly" distro ?

I currently use Linux Mint 17.1. I run SCID, SCID-vs-PC, and Arena 3.5 (via Wine) and of course PyChess and Xboard.

I believe it's a chess friendly release; at least for me.

[CositasBuenas]

Open a terminal and type: "sudo apt-get install scid" (without the quotes).

If you need the newest version compile it. Have a look at

http://sourceforge.net/p/scid/wiki/CompileScid/

You also might want to take a look at Jim Ablett's Chess Distros:

http://jimablett.net63.net/chess_755/chess-distros.html

Michael

[Marek Soszynski]

PCLinuxOS (LXDE) 64-bit is on all my systems.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/get-pclinuxos/lxde/

scidvspc is in the OS repositories. You might want to install that (to resolve certain dependencies) before installing Scid itself.

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

[Lanzo]

[removed by the moderation team]. I can understand how you're feeling at this very moment. As I, myself, have went through this phase. I suggest that you try out Xubuntu, which is probably the best option you could ever hope to have. And here are a few reasons why:

1. It is extremely easy to use and install.

2. It is highly configurable.

3. It is immensely good looking. (Looks like a Mac).

4. It is lightweight. (It uses less memory and RAM than other distros use).

5. It is very fast because of it's lightweightness.

6. It is secure.

...and so much more.

Before installing, I suggest that you take the feature tour and check Xubuntu out at: http://xubuntu.org/tour/

For chess, I would suggest that you install PyChess. It is easy to use, compared to xboard and scid.

[zullil]

[removed by the moderation team].

At least they post under their real names.

And none of them has attempted to distribute Stockfish clones using multiple fake names and accounts.

[Henk]

[removed by the moderation team].

At least they post under their real names.

And none of them has attempted to distribute Stockfish clones using multiple fake names and accounts.

Skipper is a Stockfish clone. But keep it a secret.