how do i install stockfish

i have ubuntu 12.10 i have scid install but when i add an engine its a old engine so how do i install stockfish in ubuntu step by step

thank you

The optimal is compiling stockfish yourself, as the precompiled versions are slightly limited (they don't use SSE instructions/prefetching).

Nevertheless, you can download the precompiled engines from the Stockfish site, and extract the one which best matches your CPU/OS architecture to a directory in your %HOME. The download is a zip file, and the precompiled engines are inside the /Linux directory.

Make it executable ( "chmod +x stock*" in a terminal window) and then point the engine on the scid preferences. You are ready to use it.

wow thank you very much :) it worked i wonder whats that chmod +x do:)

The above small tutorial explains well the permissions issue in *nix systems.

If you want the engine to be used by many users, extract it at a system-wide directory, e.g. /opt (you will need superuser status to do that) and then use

sudo chmod 0755 stock*

to make it accessible and executable by anybody.

You could also chown the file to be owned by root, but AFAIK Ubuntu has no root user by default.

First, you need to install a Graphical User Interface (GUI) program such as Winboard, Scid, Scid vs. PC, Arena, Tarrasch Chess GUI, etc. Second, you need to install the Stockfish engine into the GUI as a UCI engine. (The GUI help file usually tells you how to install engines.) Then you should be ready to go.

Aww yea my favorite master on chess.com uses Linux.
What distro pfren?

He told you how to get a GUI. I suggest Arena. It's my personal favorite of the freeware aps but SCID and SCID VS. PC are also handy to have. Once you download Arena and install it. Download Stockfish(or any other engine you wish to install) Extract the files from the ZIP(and remember where you put the extracted file) then open Arena, on the top toolbar click "Engines" then click "Install Engine" then a box will pop up, find the executable in the engine file you extracted and click on that. Arena will ask if it's a UCI or Winboard engine. With most new engines including Stockfish click UCI and your engine is installed. If you wish to use it to play against or to analyze a game, click "engines" again then "load engine" and you're in business.

http://www.playwitharena.com/

http://scid.sourceforge.net/

http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/

There's three to get you started.

Just to add here, Arena is Windows only program so to run it under Linux (Ubuntu) you'll need to install Wine (which is not installed by default with most distributions). This page explains how you can install the latest Wine from the authors' own repositories.

http://www.winehq.org/download/ubuntu

You could also install the possibly slightly outdated version from your distribution's repositories using a command like sudo apt-get install wine or a graphical tool like Synaptic or Software Center.

Once you install Wine, simply clicking on the Arena executable (Arena.exe) should work. You could also create a desktop shortcut or menu entry for it, for easier access.

As a complete beginner to chess I'm rather overwhelmed by the complex GUIs like Arena and Scid (as well as Scid vs PC). The wealth of options and alien terminology is bewildering. You might want to look into a more beginner level GUI too like PyChess, Gnome Chess or Dreamchess (for Linux) and maybe Tarrasch for Windows (which also runs under Linux with Wine)...

Archlinux and Manjaro for desktop usage (the codebase is very similar, Manjaro is more user friendly/ conservative), Debian Wheezy on a couple of production servers I'm managing.

A simple and good GUI is chessx, and it's genuinely multiplatform.

Oh damn you are a power user this is so unexpected.
I use Arch and Debian mostly as well.  I'm a big fan of Crunchbang (#!) that's what I've been using on my laptop for a while.  I've only fooled around with Manjaro a bit but I've heard it has some nice tools and it would cut all the time out of a vanilla Arch installation.  Nothing beats building an install from the base repo up though.

This is such an amazing discovery.  Do you tile too?  I've been using mostly Awesome lately.

No, I don't use tiling window managers (excluding kwin's tiling support, which isn't that great). kwin and openbox are all I'm using.

Arch could also be used on production servers, provided that you have plenty of time to fix things (easy to spell "bleeding edge", hard to master it).

Thanks pfren! Just compiled chessx for Ubuntu 13.10 here. Had to edit the makefile to delete couple of references to non-existing files but then compiled okay and runs well, except that though it offers to automatically download a database but doesn't seem to be able to.

Also compiled Scidb, Scid and Scid vs PC. All compiled okay once I had all the necessary development packages installed. Scidb seems to have a simpler interface than the latter two. At least I can figure out most of what it does.

But sad thing about both Scidb and chessx from beginner perspective is both don't seem to have a mode for automatic play against an engine. Instead you must manually load an engine for analysis and click on it's best move after analysis to have it show-up on the board.

scidb and chessx are chessbase/ chess assistant substitutes (database managers), not Fritz/ Aquarium ones. There are several UI's to play against an engine, including Arena (which runs flawlessly via WINE).

Arena runs well under WINE indeed! Just that UI is a bit complex. So I use xboard for a game against an engine. Also tried PyChess, GNOME Chess, CuteChess, Eboard and Dreamchess but all of them are bit too unstable or not able to run UCI engines. Starting out with the ACE engine (~900 ELO) since the usual ones checkmate me within 30-40 moves.

Just to add my 2¢.. PyChess, Gnome, Eboard, and many other GUIs in the repos are very lacking and not at all designed for anyone but the casual chess player.  When I first hopped onto Linux I was testing everything in the repo with "chess" in the description one by one and it was perpetual disappointment.  I'll have to check out that chessx though, maybe I missed it when I was trying everything because I don't recall the name.

chessx is a fine application, nice looking, very stable, almost fullfeatured. The only thing it's lacking currently is a native database format- it uses exclusively PGN, which being plaintext is not suitable for really large databases (huge text files are quite difficult to manage). Some SQL based database format would be most welcome.

What's the best free database out there?  And can it compare to Chesstempo or chessgames?  I think you are the man to ask.

Yes I agree. The database oriented programs (Scid, Scid vs PC) are a bit steep with learning curve while those oriented for playing (xboard, eboard, PyChess etc.) will fail to satisfy once the newbie progresses to a level where he starts using databases. Many are apparently dead projects too like eboard, and most of them crash too often.

Something I find a bit disappointing is how many of these projects provide precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac but only sources for Linux users, asking them to compile and install. I can imagine that many non-technical Linux users (thanks to Ubuntu) could give up at this point and run something like Arena on WINE or dual-boot/switch to Windows.

But Scidb and ChessX are looking very promising. All in all we Linux users have it good since we can run many Windows apps too under Linux, as well as native apps.

Yea ChessX is nice. I like it a lot.