GNOME Chess and Stockfish 8 Engine

I am a life-long chess and FOSS enthusiast and often play my favourite game on my Linux desktops either on the excellent multi-platform PyChess or GNOME Chess. I prefer the latter simply for its cleaner interface.

I wanted to add a really strong chess engine like Stockfish but the standard repository for my openSUSE 42.2 is hosting an earlier version (version 7 vs. the current 8).

So, off I went and downloaded the Linux binaries for Stockfish 8 from its home site. It is a simple zipped archive that contains the binaries for the engine.

I extracted the archive to /opt (/opt/stockfish-8-linux) and proceeded to edit the GNOME Chess engines config file (/etc/gnome-chess/engines.conf); the config file already has a list of chess engines that it supports, so I proceeded to the Stockfish portion and changed the binary= line to the exact location of the Stockfish binary i.e. /opt/stockfish-8-linux/Linux/stockfish_8_64.

And now off to bash heads with the latest and greatest from the Stockfish project.