GNU Chess 5 This document discusses the issues related to running the GNU Chess 5.0 (or newer) engine together with eboard. Felipe Bergo <bergo@seul.org> 1. What is GNU Chess 5 ? 2. Getting GNU Chess 5 3. Compiling and Installing 4. Playing --- 1. What is GNU Chess 5 ? GNU Chess 5 is a Free Software chess engine, that can be modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Right now the best modification I can think of is running 'rm' all over it. I strongly advise using GNU Chess 4.x instead. See GNUChess4.txt for documentation about it. As of 5.02, it eats an absurd amount of memory (>60 MB) and **THE CURRENT 'install' TARGET IN THE Makefile ASSUMES YOU ARE RUNNING A MICROSOFT(R) WINDOWS(TM) operating system**. Go ahead. Scream like I did. How the Free Software Foundation managed to allow a software like this to bear the "GNU" name I can only wonder. Also, the source code is distributed in a monolithic 30 MB tarball that includes a 103 MB (after uncompressing) PGN file to generate the book. That means that if you want to upgrade from 5.02 to, say, 5.03, you must get the whole thing again. My 33.6 kbps modem loved that. And you can be sure I won't ever get a newer version of this thing again unless they separate code and PGN data. Those who come to me with requests like 'I'm having problems with GNU Chess 5.XX', where XX > 02, will get the only acceptable answer: 'Solution: remove GNU chess from your system'. If all that wasn't already enough: I followed the exact instructions to build the binary book data file and... nothing happened (no error message, no crash, *nothing*). The 103-MB file was completely useless to me. 2. Getting GNU Chess Go to any GNU ftp repository, like ftp.gnu.org and look for the 'chess' directory. You'll notice that GNU isn't keeping older versions of GNU chess in their FTP directories. Maybe the previous versions sucked much less and they want to avoid the contrast. Anyway, I'll hunt down some older versions and place them at eboard's anonymous FTP area (check the eboard web site and project page for links) I'll start looking for other GPL'd (or at least free in the Debian DFSG meaning - BSD, GPL or Artistic Licenses) engines and comment about them in the eboard site when possible. 3. Compiling and Installing Since I didn't manage to build a opening book on my development box, eboard has no support for books with GNU chess. Just build it as instructed in the documentation and copy the resulting 'gnuchess' binary to anywhere in your PATH (e.g.: /usr/local/bin). If you are using a not-so-fresh version of GCC you may run into trouble compiling it, try removing the -O3 parameter from the Makefile, worked for me. All I can say is 'Good Luck'. 4. Playing For GNU Chess 5, use the Peer -> Play against Engine -> Generic Engine command. The "GNU Chess 4" command is meant and optimized for GNU Chess 4.x.