Debian package for a XBoard 4.4.0 beta version available

[H.G.Muller]

I just posted a binary Debian package for a beta version of XBoard 4.4.0 on my website.

You are welcome to try it out and report any problems here.
The link: http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/xboard ... 1_i386.deb

[Volker Pittlik]

Very good news. I'm going to try it after installing a 32 bit Debian. Please be patient because the download seems to be very slow.


vp

[H.G.Muller]

Note that bugs surfaced in one of the other threads, and that a new package that fixes those is now at

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/xboard ... 2_i386.deb

(and that the -1 package is gone).

[nepossiver]

Does this package install on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope or some similar silliness) cleanly? Or are some tweaks necessary? I would love to have the new XBoard on my Ubuntu, and as far as I know, Ubuntu and Debian .debs are not 100% compatible.

[H.G.Muller]

Your question far exceeds my knowledge of such things, so I am afraid this is for you to find out.

All I can say is that I could install from it on my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). I have no idea if it installed "cleanly", though, or even what that means. (Perhaps you can only know how "dirty" an install was when you try to uninstall?) XBoard appeared on the games menu and on the desktop, complete with icon, as it was supposed to, and I could run it.

[rigao]

The debian package worked in my Xubuntu 9.04 32 bits. As Muller, i dont really know if it was clean or not. It just worked, and now i have xboard in the games menu too.

A problem that seems to arise always is that xboard tries to load fairy-max as a default engine, but the installer does not install it. I think this must be corrected. Either you include fairy-max in the distribution (or any other engine) as the default engine, so everything works out of the box, or you do not include any primary engine at all in the xboard.ini, because it causes that ppl like me that does not want to work much and dont know much either get annoyed.

[H.G.Muller]

I don't think that gnuchess was automatically installed when you installed xboard 4.2.7. I don't know exactly what Ubuntu policy is for designating a package as dependent on another one. The engines are only in the "suggests" category for the Debian dependencies.

It could however be a good idea to have XBoard simply switch to game-viewer mode if the engine is not found, rather than exiting.

[rigao]

That would made the trick, since it is quite annoying that you just want to open it to see if it all works, and then kind of hangs up because it doesn't find the engine.

[Volker Pittlik]

... a new package ....

Meanwhile I have succesfullly installed that package on a 32-bit ubuntu running on a EeePc netbook. It is running O.K. so far. It complains about a missing FairyMax but I guess I can run some more tests soon.


vp

[nepossiver]

It installed and seems to be running fine on my Ubuntu 9.04 32bit laptop as well. What I was afraid was incompatibility between my OS libraries and the libraries where XBoard was compiled - in case of dynamically linked libraries. I am a (old) newbie, I've installed linux a couple of times the past years, but I've never learnt a lot.

Just a small complain / question: the default menu behaviour (press mouse button, scroll, release mouse button to select) is a bit annoying for me, is there a way to change it to the "regular" behaviour (click, scroll, click again)?

Anyway, XBoard is great, nice to see it going back to linux and helping me stay logged off from my windows longer.