XBoard / WinBoard 4.6.0 released

[hgm]

Savaannah's focus is hosting free software, and as such, they care not about who owns the license, but that the license is free.

This is unfortunately not the how it is in practice. They require us to sign over the copyright of any patch we make to FSF, and it required long and tedious arguing to even be allowed to use the GPL'ed GhostView file browser.

[MrEdCollins]

Please note that the link given to download the executable only

"Download WinBoard 4.6.0 executable + master ini file"

which is http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.6.0.zip

currently gives me a "404 Not Found" error message.

[stevenaaus]

Just trying to learn how to play crazyhouse, i found an easy segfault.

Open Engine->LoadNewEngine, type anything in an entry box and double-click the entry box.

(And then the "No such directory" error dialog won't let me click "ok" for a time interval - though perhaps this is by design).

Haha - playing crazyhouse with Sjeng. This is great.

[kinderchocolate]

I'm trying to compile XBoard in Ubuntu. The configure askes me to install the package makeinfo. Typing make gives:

Makefile:3: *** missing separator. Stop.

Do we have a pre-compiled binary for Linux?

[hgm]

Please note that the link given to download the executable only

"Download WinBoard 4.6.0 executable + master ini file"

which is http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.6.0.zip

currently gives me a "404 Not Found" error message.

Forgot to upload the file...

It should be fixed now.

[kinderchocolate]

Can Xboard be used to connect an UCI engine to FICS? If not, what about other alternatives?

[hgm]

I'm trying to compile XBoard in Ubuntu. The configure askes me to install the package makeinfo. Typing make gives:

Makefile:3: *** missing separator. Stop.

Do we have a pre-compiled binary for Linux?

This is after you installed the makeinfo package? (I guess this is needed for creating the man file.)

To be completely sure: what you do is

1) unpack the tar ball as (say) xboard-4.6.0
2) cd xboard-4.6.0
3) ./configure
4) make
5) sudo make install

and you get this error during step 4? (This would be strange, because I use Ubuntu too, and for me this procedure worked without complaints. But I am using Ubuntu 10.04.)

The XBoard home page mentions binary packets on the build server. But I don't make these myself, and they might be for the development version only. I guess the official maintainers like Debian still have not reacted to this new release. I did not create any packages myself. (I don't really use Linux, and I would not know how. I know how to compile from source, but that is about it.)

[hgm]

Can Xboard be used to connect an UCI engine to FICS? If not, what about other alternatives?

Sure. Just type

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -zp -fcp ./ENGINE -fd ENGINEDIR -fUCI -autoKibitz -keepAlive 10

(Do not forget the -zp !) If you have timeseal on your machine you could also add -icshelper timeseal to compensate for network lag. The -keepAlive 10 sends a "date" command every 10 min to circumvent the FICS idle time-out. If yu have an engine that complies to Linux file-system standards (i.e. sits in a folder in your PATH like /usr/games, and knows how to find its own data files), such as fruit, it is enough to do

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -zp -fcp fruit -fUCI -autoKibitz -keepAlive 10

[hgm]

Just trying to learn how to play crazyhouse, i found an easy segfault.

Open Engine->LoadNewEngine, type anything in an entry box and double-click the entry box.

(And then the "No such directory" error dialog won't let me click "ok" for a time interval - though perhaps this is by design).

I am trying to reproduce this, but so far no luck. Which entry box are you typing in? The engine command?

Double-clicking a text widget has no effect for me other than that it gets selected and a cursor appears in it (or if there is text in it, the text gets selected). As far as I could figure out double-clicking is a concept unknown to X11 anyway; it just counts as two independent single clicks. Do you click an empty widget, or was there text in it, and if so, do you click on the text or behind it?

How can it be that you get an error popup after a segfault? The segfault should immediately terminate the process.

I noticed that OK buttons in error popups for XBoard are often unreliable. I was so far not able to figure out why this is. (There is a pattern, though: if you have multiple error popups the OK button of one does not work until you close the other.)

When startup of an engine fails, XBoard is supposed to switch back to -ncp mode. (This used to be a fatal error making it exit in earlier versions.) I see now that this does not work when you load a non-existing engine from the Load Engine dialog: the Machine White etc. menu items do not get grayed out. (They do if you put a non-existing -fcp on the command line.)

It is a bit annoying that in both cases it still waits for the features time-out (displaying the message "starting Chess program"). I should cut that short when making appear the error popup that tells the engine did not exist.

[Michel]

I can't figure out a way to clear the board in the new "Edit Position" mode.

Also I must say that sliding selection is not very comfortable with a trackpad (perhaps with a mouse it is, I don't know).

I wonder if there is a way to reenable the original context menu which I found very convenient (and fast).