Xboard won't run in Bodhi

[manselton]

This may be the wrong place to enquire but I thought you might be able to give me some pointers as to what is wrong.

I try to run Xboard 4.5.3 in Bodhi Linux (an Ubuntu Precise based distro with the Englightenment e17 desktop). I find I have to specify fonts but a) clockfont is not recognised and b) there is a list of unrecognized arguments. Below is the output of

% script --command "xboard -debug -font ""-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-narrow--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1"" -clockfont "-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--0-0-75-75-c-0-iso8859-1"" xboard.log

Thanks in advance for any light you might be able to shed. Oh, before I forget

% uname -a
Linux cube 3.7.0-7-generic #15 SMP Thu Dec 27 21:47:00 CST 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Script started, file is xboard.log
Unrecognized argument -appendPV in settings file
Unrecognized argument -pieceImageDirectory in settings file
Unrecognized argument -trueColors in settings file
Unrecognized argument -pieceMenu in settings file
Unrecognized argument -sweepPromotions in settings file
Unrecognized argument -autoBox in settings file
Unrecognized argument -onlyOwnGames in settings file
Unrecognized argument -autoCreateLogon in settings file
Unrecognized argument -recentEngines in settings file
Unrecognized argument -recentEngineList in settings file
Unrecognized argument -uxiAdapter in settings file
Unrecognized argument -discourageOwnBooks in settings file
Unrecognized argument -usePieceFont in settings file
Unrecognized argument -useBoardTexture in settings file
Unrecognized argument -useBorder in settings file
Unrecognized argument -border in settings file
Unrecognized argument -pgnNumberTag in settings file
Unrecognized argument -logoSize in settings file
Unrecognized argument -logoDir in settings file
Unrecognized argument -featureDefaults in settings file
Unrecognized argument -absoluteAnalysisScores in settings file
Unrecognized argument -scoreWhite in settings file
Unrecognized argument -evalZoom in settings file
Unrecognized argument -evalThreshold in settings file
Unrecognized argument -pairingEngine in settings file
Unrecognized argument -defaultTourneyName in settings file
Unrecognized argument -viewerOptions in settings file
Unrecognized argument -tourneyOptions in settings file
Unrecognized argument -autoCopyPV in settings file
Unrecognized argument -topLevel in settings file
Unrecognized argument -dialogColor in settings file
Unrecognized argument -buttonColor in settings file
Unrecognized argument -slaveX in settings file
Unrecognized argument -slaveY in settings file
xboard: Unrecognized argument -clockfont
GameEnds(0, xboard exit, 2)
Script done, file is xboard.log

[manselton]

Just tried to build Xboard 4.7.0 but ./configure is failing:

1. "makeinfo not found" - so I installed texinfo to correct this but then on running ./configure again:
2. "configure: error: Package requirements ( cairo >= 1.2.0 librsvg-2.0 >= 2.14.0 ) were not met"

but librsvg2-2 is installed and libcairo2 is installed. Sorry to ask but I'm not a programmer so I'm just hacking around to see if I can fix it. Any advice gratefully received.

Maurice

[H.G.Muller]

XBoard saves its settings in a file .xboardrc in your home directory (from version 4.5.0 on). It seems that installing 4.5.3 was a downgrade, and that you already had a ~/.xboardrc that contained settings from a later version, which 4.5.3 does not know yet. I am not sure whether this is a fatal error for 4.5.3; at some point I changed the error handling from exiting to simply skipping the rest of the line of the settings file, when an unknown option was encountered in a file. If it was a fatal error, you would have to delete .xboardrc by hand. Otherwise the errors would appear automatically when you run for a second time, when XBoard overwrites the .xboardrc saving its settings (when it of course only saves settings it does know).

-clockFont should be with a capital F; XBoard options are case-sensitive.

As to 4.7.0: I am no expert on Linux use, but there must be some command to let the package manager tell you which version exactly of a package you have installed. librsvg2-2 does not really say that, for all I know it could be version 2.10.3, and then it would not satisfy the >= 2.14.0 requirement. libcairo2 suggest that the version number of cairo you have should at least start with a 2, so I guess that should be OK. I don't know if the error message implies that all the mentioned packages are missing / not up-to-date, or that it already prints all the packages if one doesn't meet the test.

[manselton]

Ah! Thank you for the info!

% cat .xboardrc
;
; xboard 4.7.0 Save Settings file
;
...

My home system holds operating systems, with which I experiment, on the first hard drive and all my personal data on the second. So one of the other OS has xboard-4.7.0 installed and this explains everything.

% mv .xboardrc .xboard-4.7.0
% xboard &

just worked perfectly! Thank you for your response. I ought to have looked for an rc file. What a numpty. Still I learned quite a lot exploring. Thanks again and thank you for the programs

Maurice

[manselton]

Purely for the sake of interest I returned to trying to build xboard-4.7.0 from source. The fundamental fault was another schoolboy error. When building packages from source in GNU/Linux you should always have the development files installed as these contain the header files that the source code needs to do the configuring and making. In more detail, the missing version numbers were

librsvg2-2 Version: 2.36.1-0ubuntu1
libcairo2 Version: 1.10.2-6.1ubuntu3

The build went through once I'd invoked (as root)

# aptitude install librsvg2-dev libcairo2-dev libxt-dev libxaw7-dev

These pulled in a lot of X development files automatically. Running ./xboard in the build directory lacked default pieces at this point but they were easy to find via View-Board and browse the build dir. Everything worked just fine. It can still be polished with gtk and something else (I forget) but I'm well pleased.

Thanks again
Moss