FICS-Timeseal

This document describes the configuration of FICS's timeseal
program to work with eboard.

Felipe Bergo <bergo@seul.org>

1. What is FICS timeseal ?
2. Getting timeseal
3. Naming and Location

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1. What is FICS timeseal ?

It is a program that attaches timestamps to line-oriented
communcations over a TCP stream to reduce the impact
of network-lag on the chess clocks when playing on an
ICS server. FICS timeseal is the program related to
FICS <http://www.freechess.org>

You can play without timeseal, but you will have transmission
time accounted and be in disadvantage against timesealed players
(almost all). In fact, playing anything faster than 5 0 without
timeseal is foolish.

2. Getting timeseal

timeseal can be obtained (binary only) from

<ftp://ftp.freechess.org/pub/chess/timeseal>

You'll have to pick the correct architecture there.

  +==============================================================+
  |                                                              |
  |IMPORTANT: if you get timeseal from FICS's FTP site, on Linux |
  |           PCs you should get the i386 one, not the i586 ones.|
  |           The i586 ones, despite the name, are linked against|
  |           very old libraries no one has anymore, and the i386|
  |           one is statically linked - works most anywhere.    |
  |           Most "timeseal doesn't work" complaints I get are  |
  |           due to people getting the i586 ones.               |
  |                                                              |
  +==============================================================+

3. Naming and Location

eboard will only use timeseal if it finds it (d'oh), and the
timeseal must be named and located strictly.

Locations (pick one!):

. (current directory)
~/.eboard
~/share/eboard
<prefix>/share/eboard
/usr/local/share/eboard
/usr/share/eboard

(prefix is configured with --prefix in the configure script,
the default is /usr/local)

Naming:

timeseal.YOURSYSTEMNAME

where YOURSYSTEMNAME is the EXACT string returned by

uname -s

Also, uname must be in the path when eboard is run.
For GNU/Linux systems, the timeseal program should be
named

timeseal.Linux

for FreeBSD:

timeseal.FreeBSD

and so on. 
This allows you to place timeseals for different OSs in a
NFS-mounted /home and have eboard run the correct one
automatically.