Installation instructions

Packages for the following Linux distributions are generated:

Ubuntu 20.10 (also works on Ubuntu 19.10)
Ubuntu 18.04
Debian 9.13 (also works on Debian 10)
Fedora 32 (also works on Fedora 33)
OpenSUSE 15.1 (also works on OpenSUSE 15.2)
Arch Linux (docker)
Mandriva is derived from Ubuntu. Find out from which version of Ubuntu is your Madriva derived and continue by proper Ubuntu package.

Generally speaking, nocheto can be installed on any Linux distribution (64-bit intel/amd), which supports .deb or .rpm packages. But it needs to have the proper libraries in right versions. See the ldd output and check if your distribution has requested libraries. (The most problematic packages are libgraphicsmagick++, libreadline, libssl (or openssl) and libsoci. If you want to install nocheto on any unsupported linux distribution, make sure you have the right version of this packages!).

If newer version of one of the supported distributions are missing, please let me know!

Postinstall instructions

1: Remove emoji

On some distributions (I am talking about you, Ubuntu!) there are installed ugly icons into console (see picture below). Instead of UTF-8 char of black pawn, there is this icon, whose color cannot be changed (and do not match with other pieces characters).

To get rid of it, remove fonts-noto-color-emoji package.

apt-get remove fonts-noto-color-emoji

Restart your console and you should be fine.

2: Make sure that stockfish can be run

On some distributions, stockfish executable is not installed in one of the paths which are usually in your PATH variable. For example, in Ubuntu 20.10 it is installed into /usr/games/stockfish.

If stockfish cannot be run, you can get this error while starting nocheto:

$ nocheto
Nocheto (Noidea Chess Tool) 0.33, Ubuntu20_10, COVID 19 edition
Type 'help' for help.
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'App::Exceptions::Exception'
  what():  Execpl error.
Magick: abort due to signal 6 (SIGABRT) "Abort"...
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'App::Exceptions::IOException'
  what():  No uciok message returned.
Magick: abort due to signal 6 (SIGABRT) "Abort"...

To fix this, you can a) add /usr/games/ to your PATH variable

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/games/

or b) create symlink to a path which is already in your $PATH

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:

$ ln -s /usr/games/stockfish /usr/local/bin/stockfish

3: optionally disable check for new version

As you can see on the picture above, nocheto look for a new version at the start (at maximum once a day). If you do not have internet access (or this website is down), nocheto can hang a does not start.

To disable checking for new version, open ~/.nocheto/configs/nocheto.ini and change line checkforupdate = 1 to checkforupdate = 0.

Note: This directory and configuration file is created after you run nocheto for the first time. So, first run nocheto, then edit this file ;-).

4: install sounds

Nocheto is not shipped with sounds. But if you download any of move.wav, capture.wav and mate.wav to ~/.nocheto/sounds/default/ directory, nocheto will use them.

You can find good sound at lichess github.

You need to convert the mp3 file to wav, for example:

wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ornicar/lila/master/public/sound/standard/Move.mp3" -O ~/.nocheto/sounds/default/move.mp3
ffmpeg -i ~/.nocheto/sounds/default/move.mp3 ~/.nocheto/sounds/default/move.wav
aplay ~/.nocheto/sounds/default/move.wav # test the sound
rm ~/.nocheto/sounds/default/move.mp3

Note: I was unsuccessfull with wav files created under arch docker as described above. Use ffmpeg in your native linux environment to do that.

Nocheto uses aplay program to play wav sounds, be sure you have installed it (it is in alsa-utils package). You might have to create ~/.asoundrc file with the following content:

pcm.!default {
        type hw
        card 1
}

ctl.!default {
        type hw           
        card 0
}