I just installed slackware 13.1, and Xboard, a part of gnuchess, doesn't start. Instead, it gives me the following error message:

"Failed to start first chess program fairymax on localhost: fairymax: No such file or directory"

The game was working fine on 13.0. Anyone else having this problem? Any ideas on how to fix it?

thx

Yep. Same here.

You can get it working by starting it with "xboard -fcp gnuchess".

eboard also seems to be broken. the gnuchess 4 engine option doesn't seem to want to work with gnuchess 5 included in 13.1.

I've not looked into it in any detail though.


I must admit that I'm starting to get a little frustrated with all these little niggles in 13.1. None of them are particularly major, but it seems like just when you think you're getting on top of it, another couple pop up.

Indeed, the default chess engine in xboard seems to have changed to one that does not ship with Slackware (never heard of fairymax). I guess we will have to patch the xboard.desktop file for gnuchess.

As for eboard, if you want to use gnuchess 5 with that, just select the "generic engine" and keep the default engine command "gnuchess". The specific engine entry for "gnu chess 4" will only work with the version 4 of GNU Chess (which does not ship with Slackware), because eboard uses some special optimizations for using that engine.

PS: all those little niggles in Slackware 13.1 will not be uncovered in time before the stable release, unless people use slackware-current and run into these issues. The problem is that most people stick to stable releases until the time where Slackware ChangeLog.txt annouces the first release candidate for an upcoming stable release. The time between that announcement and the eventual release is usually too short for a lot of people to check the gazillion little programs in Slackware and find that some things no longer work.

Eric

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Yes, I completely understand, and that's why I run current here(*), and do drop Pat a mail when I find/fix something locally. No criticism intended, I can be a bit of a perfectionist and was just venting. I appreciate that the small team that is Slackware can't possibly test everything or find every bug.


(*) Well, that and the fact that as current tends to get KDE fixes that stable doesn't 'current' is for the majority of it's life more stable than Stable is. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the rolling-release method is really the only one that makes sense for linux distro's due to the nature of how upstream tends to operate.

Eric,

Unfortunately, some of us have to take "stable" as, in fact, stable. Although I've run -current at times in the past and contributed when I could, but I do not have the time nor the resources to do that. These "niggles" seem like regressions to an earlier state of Slackware development. Unfortunately, I had overlooked xboard/eboard since I use Jinchess and scid otherwise I would have dropped a line ASAP. But I can't just blame Slackware though. These same niggles pop up with a lot of distros lately.

Sshhh...I suspect a Redmond conspiracy...

I installed fairymax (it's as easy as type "make install") and it did it with ease