Note, posted to rec.games.chess.computer and BCC'ed to the eboard
project admin

I tried to install eboard

http://eboard.sourceforge.net/

which is a chess interface for Unix-like systems. But had a 4 problems
which I have solved. I thought others might like to know of them, as I
see someone else mention problems compiling eboard. Some of these issues
are Solaris specific (I'm using a Sun Ultra 80 with Solaris 10), but
some are not OS specific.


1) The configure script checks for the sanity of install, but is not happy.

configuring eboard 0.9.5...
checking sanity of install... FAIL
** install is not working properly.

The first 'install' program found on my search path was Sun's
/usr/sbin/install

but there is also the GNU version on the system at

/opt/sfw/bin/install

So I changed the order of the search path, so /usr/sbin was after
/opt/sfw/bin

That solved that problem.

2) The file proto_xboard.cc
has this line:

p=rindex(zz,'/');

but rindex() is a legacy function:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/...ns/rindex.html

My Solaris box does not have it (or at least I did not find it quickly)
But rindex(a,b) is *exactly* the same as strrchr(a,b).

So one just needs to replace the line

p=rindex(zz,'/');

with

p=strrchr(zz,'/');


3) After building, the binary would not run as it could not find the
library:

libgdk_imlib.so.1

That was easy to fix. The directory this is in (/opt/sfw/lib/) was not
in the library search path, so I added it to the end of LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
Adding --extra-ld=/opt/sfw/lib/ to configure did not help, so I had to
edit LD_LIBRARY_PATH. (I'd prefer the directory was hard coded in the
binary, but LD_LIBRARY_PATH will do for now)

4) eboard tries to log onto FICS using port 5000. Not a problem if you
know that, but it is not obvious what port it is using. I believe like
ICC, FICS will work with many ports. So one needs to know which if one
uses a firewall that blocks outgoing traffic (many only block incoming
traffic)

So I had to open up port 5000 to outgoing traffic at the FICS chess
servers IP address (69.36.243.188) on my firewall.


Hope that is helpful to someone. If not, you know what the delete key is
for.
--
Dave K MCSE.

MCSE = Minefield Consultant and Solitaire Expert.

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form:



Hitting reply will work for a few months only - later set it manually.

http://witm.sourceforge.net/ (Web based Mathematica front end)