Saturday, December 19, 2015

Installing SCIDvsPC on openSUSE Leap 42.1

SCIDvsPC is a "fork" of the multi-platform SCID chess database and toolkit. As an unabashed openSUSE advocate and user, I was overjoyed when the long-term support openSUSE Leap was released but was disappointed with the relatively smaller selection of games and the exclusion of SCIDvsPC.

Ah well, to get it installed, you will still need to download the tarball from the SCIDvsPC site, extract it and compile it.

Firstly, install the necessary dependencies:

#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 libitm1 libtsan0 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-4.15.tgz
$cd scid_vs_pc-4.15

After the extraction, then proceed 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!