I am a huge fan of chess and have been so since I learned the rules at twelve. Growing up in a single parent family money was always tight and chess was way more affordable than football or tennis. I was a pretty good
player in my teenage years and chess was good to me - through it I met two of my exes (ahem!), got to travel to competitions and met some really interesting people and was always known as the chess dude in school - though the jocks would never fail to make fun of me and my team-mates achievements and the lack of our athleticism for "real" games.
Well, of late my passion for chess was once again ignited. As a Linux user, our choices of chess programs are actually quite poor compared to the likes of Fritz, ChessBase, Chess Assistant etc for the Microsoft Windows platform. Shredder Chess has a Linux version but it will not work on the latest distros due to a problem with the display managers and besides its creator seems keener on the mobile platform. Shredder Chess for Android is a good program for a modest fee and I highly recommend it.
I discovered ScidVsPC after Googling around and found it to be an excellent suite for game manager and analysis. It doesn't come pre-build with any RPMs for Fedora Linux and CentOS/RHEL - installing it therefore will require the venerable 3-step to Nirvana - configure, make and make install. On my Fedora Linux 23 notebook, this is what I did to get it installed:
Install the dependencies and StockFish Engine
# dnf install tk-devel tcl-devel gcc-c++ tkimg zlib-devel stockfish
Download the tarball, extract it and compile:
$ tar -zxvf scid_vs_pc-4.16.tgz
$ cd scid_vs_pc-4.16
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install
To launch it you will need to execute the following from CLI
$ scid
Or create a launcher by creating a desktop file (save it into ~/.local/share/applications ):
$ vi ~/.local/share/applications/scid.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Scid vs. PC
Comment=Scid vs. PC Games Management
Exec=/usr/local/bin/scid
Icon=/home/eyeoh/Downloads/Scidlogo.png
Terminal=false
Adding the Stockfish Chess Engine - from within the ScidvsPC UI -> Tools -> Analysis Engines -> enter /usr/bin/stockfish20.bin in the Command field and the click on the ~/scidvspc button and finally click on OK.
And you are good to go! Enjoy!
Development Release: openSUSE 15.6 RC
-
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The
openSUSE project has entered its release candidate phase for Leap version
15.6. The ne...
17 hours ago
No comments:
Post a Comment