Study tools for Unix

Written by alejo on September 3rd, 2008

The more I’m using unix systems, the more homesick I’m of windows. It is very secure and has lots of advantages when compared to Microsoft’s operative system, but the lack of powerful go software for Unix as well as good drivers for 3D cards are two of the major drawbacks.

Today I’ve been playing with some programs and Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) trying to get them working.

Here you have the results, ordered from worst perfomance to best.

Worst:

Smartgo: Unable to load program.
Moyo Go Studio: loads the program but fails to render the board, which turns the program in somewhat close to useless.

Works with bugs:

Stonebase: it does work, but it presents some bugs when trying to open games and a few more minor bugs. On the other hand, it is the only free software which includes an extensive database of professional games (though the names are in chinese).

Good:

Drago: works smoothly.

There are other programs which are directly designed for working under linux systems which I already talked about.

Other newer programs such as Universal 3D chess… show problems mostly related with the 3D card drivers. On the specific case of U3DC, the drop-down menus are disabled and the variation tree doesn’t work, once you click on the variation tree, the program breaks down. On the other hand, it is a very good piece of software for making demostrations and so on.

Here you have some samples of Stonebase working on my ubuntu laptop.

On the first picture you can see the free sample of professional games they give in English, the second one shows a game and a selected region and the third one shows the possibilities of this software when it comes to graphics customization.

Here you have some screenshots of Drago:

The first image shows a normal game among high dans in KGS, the second one shows how does the pattern search engine work (which actually is Kombilo) and the third one gives the result of the pattern search applied to a database of Shusaku’s games.

Trick: if you have a hard disk partition with your go software installed in it, you don’t need to reinstall it on linux. Just browse the windows hard disk from linux (ubuntu in my case, but I guess it must work in all Debian based distros, others I don’t know) and drag the executable file to the linux console. Now write “wine” without the semicolons before the path of the executable file, enjoy

Permalink

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments to “Study tools for Unix”

Posted by kennuu, September 3rd, 2008 at 3:51 pm

I’d like add that there are some sgf readers that can be used natively in linux / unix.

I have used gowrite (http://gowrite.net/) and it’s great!

Posted by Alejo, September 3rd, 2008 at 5:27 pm

Yes, there are some native applications for unix systems… that’s what I wanted to say with: “There are other programs which are directly designed for working under linux systems which I already talked about.” But it’s true that I didn’t talk about Gowrite.

But the main problem is that these don’t offer pattern searching engines as the “study tools” I described. Kombilo is the only pattern search engine which can be run natively in Unix systems but if somehow fails when it comes to the rest of the features.

Alejo's Tenuki

A few moments to learn, a lifetime to master