Installing SCIDvsPC on openSUSE 13.2

I enjoy running openSUSE and play chess. However, I find it tough to get a chess program close to the quality of ChessBase and Fritz. Shredder Chess was the closest, but as of openSUSE 13x, Fedora 2x and Ubuntu 14x - a problem with the X makes it unusable.

Stockfish is a fine engine, but the chess UIs in Linux is sorely in need of overhaul.

Until I came across SCIDvsPC - seems to fulfill my needs - a DB with playing and analysis options. There are no binaries for openSUSE but you can download the tar ball and compile it. It sounds more horrible than it actually is. Firstly, install the depedencies:

#zypper in kbproto-devel libX11-devel libXau-devel libxcb-damage0 libxcb-devel libxcb-dpms0 libxcb-record0 libxcb-res0 libxcb-screensaver0 libxcb-xevie0 libxcb-xinerama0 libxcb-xprint0 libxcb-xtest0 libxcb-xvmc0 pthread-stubs-devel tcl-devel tk-devel xproto-devel gcc gcc48 glibc-devel libasan0 libatomic1-gcc49 libitm1-gcc49 libtsan0-gcc49 linux-glibc-devel gcc48-c++ gcc-c++ libstdc++48-devel snack tkimg tkimg-devel make 

Then extract the downloaded SCIDvsPC tarball:

$tar -zxvf  scid_vs_pc-4.14.tgz
$cd scid_vs_pc-4.14

After the extraction, the compile it:


$./configure
$su
#make
#make install

To execute the SCIDvsPC application, type scid on the CLI.

Stockfish is an excellent analysis engine that can be installed if you have the Packman repository enabled. You can get it from One-Click install from here 

After installing Stockfish, you can add Stockfish to the list of analysis engines for SCIDvsPC. From the SCIDvsPC application, Tools -> Analysis Engines -> New;  enter /usr/bin/stockfish20.bin in the Command field and the click on the ~/scidvspc button and finally click on OK.

Enjoy!