Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 09:29:56 06/24/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 24, 2003 at 10:42:59, Omid David Tabibi wrote: >I was wondering about the popularity of Linux amongst the computer chess >programmers. How many use Linux as the primary environment? Crafty, ...? > >Also, did any of the participants in Maastricht WCCC use Linux? Will anyone use >Linux in Graz? I would *like* to use linux as my primary computer chess development OS, but there are a few restricting factors. 1. There are many more engines available for Windows, which makes running tournaments against other engines easier, since I can play against a wider variety of playing strengths. 2. Arena is only available for Windows, and I like it better than XBoard for developing and testing, and running tournaments. 3. I have problems with linux from time to time. I'm sure it's something that I unknowingly cause, but one day I will boot up and all of the sudden various devices can't be initialized, can't bring up the internet, can't start the GUI, and so on. I don't know enough yet about how to fix these things, so I'm a little uneasy about using linux as my primary OS (never know when any of those things will happen, or when you'll lose a partition, etc.). I'm taking a class at a local community college in the fall about unix system administration, which covers installing both linux and unix, configuring everything, disaster recovery (backups, hacker attacks, etc.), so maybe after that class I might use linux as my primary OS. I think that this is one thing that would still scare off 99% of the computer users. If they're running linux, and something stops working, they're screwed for the next few days until they can read through a lot of documentation, post to newsgroups, wait for help. I've been using Windows 2000 now for several years, and I can't remember a problem that wasn't solved by rebooting, and it runs for quite a while with no problems (going on 5 days at the moment). If I was going to an important computer tournament, I'd certainly use Windows at this point, because if something went wrong, I wouldn't know what to do (well, I'd just boot up to Windows probably).
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.