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John Johnson Okah
John Johnson Okah

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[won] The 16hours battle to installed pychess

After coding for the day at 17:00, I needed to take a break. Then decided to play chess on my PC. This is how the 1st hour began.

I won't go into the nitty-gritty detail, instead I would tell you where the battle was tough and how it was won.

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Okay let's begin! 🏁
The battle started with a Google search: "best chess games for linux". After scanning through few posts, I went for pychess because SCIDvsPC couldn't install and I'm a pythonista, I would like to check out pychess source code someday.
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Now, I have decided to go with pychess. First I tried installing it using pip:

$ pip install pychess
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Within a minute, it installed. "WOW that was fast", I said to myself. Then I tried to open the app, but it failed to startup. At that moment, I think I heard my PC say "YEAH not so fast".

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I kept on battling with it. I went back to my dear friend Google, and he directed me to Professor Stackoverflow and others, but they give me no direct answer. After about 3 hours, I saw something about cloning the pychess git repo.

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$ git clone https://github.com/pychess/pychess.git
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Surprisingly, this somehow worked. I could run the pychess directly from the repo I cloned. But when I wanted to install it, another phase of the battle began.
To cut it all short, this is how the battle was won (also what I learnt):

  • The first time I tried to install it, I did it without the magic word, "sudo", and It stopped half way.
  • Then I had to uninstall it. Unfortunately, my terminal told me I can't use "pip uninstall pychess" to remove a distutils project.
  • So I went to /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages to remove everything that had pychess on it.
  • My terminal refused to do what I said until I did it the hard way:
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/pychess/
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/pychess-1.0.2.egg-info
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  • It was out. This time I remembered to add the magic word, "sudo", as I tried to reinstall the pychess from the cloned repo.
  • And at last, IT WORKED.🚀

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