Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Chess on Manjaro for Raspberry Pi 4 - installing Stockfish Engine on KNights

Playing around on my Manjaro KDE for Raspberri Pi 4B (8GB RAM model) - so far so good - movie playback on mpv is good, Youtube vids are acceptable at default (I am not picky as I look for quality of content rather than mindless high-def vides of nonsensical sunsets, pictures of apes or pretty girls in bright dresses walking down a street etc. - so at around 480 it is good for me), I have all the tools that I need to start working and make this little device a daily driver.

 

Online chess via lichess and chess.com are good - surprisingly the bundled Firefox browser works better on chess.com than on my openSUSE Leap notebook. Lichess is always good on any Frefox/Chromium-based browsers on any platforms.


KNights - the "default" chess app for the KDE Plasma environments is available but there is no Stockfish engine that I can install from Pacman. So since I have pretty much outplayed default chess engine GNU Chess - I was itching to get Stockfish installed on this Manjaro ARM. 


Here was how I got Stockfish installed:

  1. Go to the Stockfish Engine site and download the 64-bit version - at this time Stockfish is at version 12 https://stockfishchess.org/files/stockfish_12_linux_x64.zip

  2. Unzip the downloaded archive - stockfish_12_linux_x64.zip -d /opt

  3. Create a symlink to /usr/bin - ln -s /opt/stockfish_20090216_x64 /usr/bin/stockfish

  4. Launch the KNights application -> Settings -> Configure KNights

  5. Click on Computer Engines and then Auto-Detect

  6. You should now see Stockfish listed


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