[Nottingham] Fwd: Re: Timing (& chess)

[Martin]

Marcel Taylor wrote:
>>Notice the time headers... Looks like you need to set somewhere that
>>you're in the time zone for London/Greenwhich/here and that we're on BST.
>>
>>Hint: Set your timezone, and set your hardware clock to GMT (-1hr of
>>BST). Then, the soon to happen transition from BST to GMT will be
>>automatic.
> 
> 
> I spent all evening and half the night doing the following:

Oh no! It should be a "2 seconds job"!!

>    Setting the KDE clock
>    Using YaST2 to set the Time Zone and HW Clock
>    YaST2 doing a reconfigure
>    Resetting the KDE clock
>    Sending myself an email to check the time header
>    restarting the laptop
>    Sending myself an email to check the time header
>    check, still not correct
>    going round again this loop many times
> 
> In the end I gave up. However this morning it seems OK (don't  know why).

Errr... Postfix on my system gets rather upset by the clock being reset. 
Restarting postfix (for the mail) clears its errors about the clock 
being skewed...


> Here are all the settings. Is it now correct? What am I doing wrong? I'm sure
> it shouldn't be this difficult.
> 
> Control Center - YaST2
>    Select Time Zone
>         Time Zone: etc/GMT-1
>         Hardware Clock: local time
> 
> 
> Date & Time - KDE Control Module
>    Current Time Zone: GMT-1
>    Area: Europe/London
> 
> 
> The Hardware clock is showing the current time
> 
> 
> etc/sysconfig/clock:
> 
> HWCLOCK="--localtime"
> 
> #
> # Timezone (e.g. CET)
> # (this will set /usr/lib/zoneinfo/localtime)
> #
> TIMEZONE="Etc/GMT-1"
> DEFAULT_TIMEZONE="Greenwich"

Sorry, I think I confused you.

The hardware clock is best set to GMT so that it can stay on GMT all 
year long without having to be jumped forwards or backwards by an hour 
at our BST swap-over.

If you then have your timezone set to London, the BST should be 
automatically picked up and the time displayed as the hardware clock 
time +1hour for the BST shift at the moment.

You should also be asked whether your hardware clock is set to GMT... 
Answer yes.

To get mine set, I had to set both KDE and then the Mandrake clock. All 
was sweet after doing a relogin and restarting the mail services 
(postfix). You should be able to see the time jumps in the logs.

(Also for postfix, do a "postfix check" and fix any discrepancies.)




>>(BTW: Been trying the 'crafty' chess engine and I'm getting resoundly
>>beaten (:-((
> 
> 
> I've been looking for a chess engine that has a +200 BCF, can do analysis
>  from a set position and can read commercial databases of master games. Any
>  suggestions?

This is what I have to hand:

Name: crafty
Version: 19.1-2mdk
Size: 668 KB

Summary: A free chess program, plays decent game of chess

Description: Crafty is a chess program written by Bob Hyatt 
<hyatt at cis.uab.edu>. It is modeled after Cray Blitz (also written by Bob).

Crafty has the following features:
- written in C
- can be compiled with the GNU C compiler on various platforms
- has a customizable opening book (comes as a separate .rpm)
- supports tablebases (Steven Edward's endgame database)
- text interface

How can I get a graphical interface with Crafty? On Unix systems, you 
can use XBoard with Crafty.


Name: glchess
Version: 0.4.7-1mdk
Size: 343 KB

Summary: GlChess, a 3d Chess game using OpenGL

Description: A very nice Chess game using OpenGL.



Name: gnuchess
Version: 5.05-1mdk
Size: 153 KB

Summary: The GNU chess program.

Description: The gnuchess package contains the GNU chess program.  By 
default, GNUchess uses a curses text-based interface.  Alternatively, 
GNUchess can be used in conjunction with the xboard user interface and 
the X Window System for a graphical chessboard.

You should install the gnuchess package if you would like to play chess 
on your computer.  You'll also need to install the curses package.  If 
you'd like to use a graphical interface with GNUchess, you'll also need 
to install the xboard package and the X Window System.



Name: knights
Version: 0.5.9-3mdk
Size: 1425 KB

Summary: KDE, Qt, chess, game

Description: A chess interface for the K Desktop Environment. Knights 
works with all XBoard compatible chess engines, FICS, and .pgn files.



Name: knights-themepack
Version: 0.5.6-3mdk
Size: 1177 KB

Summary: Knights thmes

Description: Knights is a chess interface for the K Desktop Environment. 
Knights works with all XBoard compatible chess engines, FICS, and .pgn 
files. This is a themes package for to control the GUI of the game.



Name: xboard
Version: 4.2.6-4mdk
Size: 1570 KB

Summary: An X Window System graphical chessboard

Description: Xboard is an X Window System based graphical chessboard 
which can be used with the GNUchess and Crafty chess programs, with 
Internet Chess Servers (ICSs), with chess via email, or with your own 
saved games.



Name: eboard
Version: 0.8.0-1mdk
Size: 1625 KB
Source: contrib
Currently installed version: (none)

Summary: FICS chess-server interface

Description: eboard is a chess interface for Unix-like systems 
(GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) based on the GTK+ GUI toolkit.  It 
provides a chess board interface to ICS (Internet Chess Servers) like 
FICS and to chess engines like GNU Chess, Sjeng and Crafty.

eboard is under development, and its primary purpose is serving as 
interface to FICS.



(Surely not! (:-O))
Name: emacs-chess
Version: 2.0b3-2mdk
Size: 800 KB
Source: contrib
Currently installed version: (none)

Summary: A client and library for playing Chess from Emacs.

Description: Chess.el does not know how to play chess against you. 
While the library does know all legal moves, there is no "thinking" 
module.  For this, you must download one of the publically available 
chess engines, such as gnuchess, crafty or phalanx.  You will find all 
of these sufficiently challenging, I'm sure.  Once they are installed, 
chess.el will use them, provided the locations of the binaries is on 
your PATH.



Name: gnome-chess
Version: 0.3.3-3mdk
Size: 426 KB
Source: main
Currently installed version: (none)

Summary: GNOME chess

Description: GNOME Chess is part of the GNOME project and is a graphical 
chess interface. It can provide and interface to GNU Chess, Crafty, 
chess servers and PGN files.



Name: scid
Version: 3.4-1mdk
Size: 5469 KB
Source: contrib
Currently installed version: (none)

Summary: Shane's Chess Information Database is a free chess database

Description: Scid (Shane's Chess Information Database) is a free chess 
database application for Unix and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Scid converts to and from PGN (Portable Game Notation) format, which is 
the standard for text-based chess information exchange, but uses its own 
fast compact format for storing files.



And then there is also:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/slibo/?topic_id=80%2C83
Slibo
  by gpiez - Monday, August 18th 2003 11:05 PDT 	Section: Software

About:
Slibo aims to be a comfortable replacement for the xboard chess 
interface, written for OpenGL and KDE. It uses the xboard protocol and 
can be used with common chess engines like crafty or gnuchess, but it 
provides its own chess engine too. Though its designed to be easy to use 
for the new chess player, it supports playing multiple games the same 
time, or anaylzing PGN files with multiple engines.



There are also one or two distributed computing projects to expand the 
horizons of chess...


Have fun!
Martin


-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
----------------