Have Chess offer to install 3D packages

Thanks for your report.

Perhaps this could be higher priority? Would it not be too difficult to write a bit of python to offer to install the required two packages using the apt bindings?

I certainly agree that a dialog saying "Please ask your system administrator to install packages X and Y" is not very helpful, and will leave many users confused and frustrated!

I agree. It should ask you if want to install them, and then install them for you, just like codecs in Totem.

James, you're welcome to submit a patch for it if you think isn't too difficult to do, thanks you.

A solution to this may involve adding new code to the upstream project but will require a significant amount of Ubuntu specific code. I recommend fixing this in Ubuntu and moving any common code upstream when a patch is developed.

I am increasing this to Medium priority. Chess is installed by default in Ubuntu and 3D acceleration / visual effects are now a standard feature in the OS. We can't expect end-users to find this bug report, in fact it's not even marked as affecting glchess.

that's only a game and it's working without that, 3d is not working on every video card and that would require extra CD use, that's really a wishlist and not a medium bug for ubuntu

*AND* "Report a problem" from the menus silently fails, apparently expecting bug-buddy to be there. I've filed that as Bug #360470

We could at least clearly show the packages, maybe redirect to help, or give apt: links.

That dialog is just plain bad.

IMO this is a usability problem. The user should not have to google or read all documentation to avoid getting error messages from menu items in the default applications.

The suggestions above about assisting the user in different ways to install the required packages are good.

The other way around would be to have the game hide the "View -> 3d chess view" menu item until the user has installed the prerequisites. Not as user friendly, but at least the game wouldn't have a broken menu item in the eyes of the first time user.

The fix proposed in bug #211962 : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pyopengl/+bug/211962
worked for me, after a fresh install of Karmic on an eeepc 1005PE platform, 3D in glchess was at start unavailable.

The fix is to add a link to LibGL.so:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/libGL.so

Then I rebuilt the ld cache:
sudo ldconfig

And 3D in glchess was back after that.

Maybe this is has more to see with openGL libs then ?

I already have a link to libGL.so:

$ sudo ls -l /usr/lib/libGL.so*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-12-05 16:26 /usr/lib/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2010-03-24 09:04 /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.185.18.36
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 792992 2009-10-26 06:16 /usr/lib/libGL.so.185.18.36

And I rebuilt the ld cache, just to be sure:

$ sudo ldconfig

But the 3D Chess View feature still does not work on my system.

Ok nadamsieee, I came to this conclusion because I looked at files in /usr/share/pyshared/glchess and find out that the error message for OpenGL libs missing (the last one I had after installing the python-gtkglext1 and python-opengl packages) was due to an import statement in chessview.py

So I tried opening a Python console and tried to execute the same statement:

$ python
>>> import OpenGL.GL

Here, I got an error message, complaining about OpenGL that could not be found

Could you try to do the same, and see if you get an error message in the Python console ?

I am able to import OpenGL in python without error:

$ python
Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Dec 7 2009, 18:43:55)
[GCC 4.4.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import OpenGL.GL
>>>

But I still have no 3D chess.

Which error do you get then ?
I thought you had also the OpenGL error popup.

Unable to enable 3D mode

You are unable to play in 3D mode due to the following problems:
No Python GTKGLExt support

Please contact your system administrator to resolve these problems, until then you will be able to play chess in 2D mode.

I suppose you have installed the python-gtkglext1 package ?
Could you try the 2 following statements in the Python console:

>>> import gtk.gtkgl
>>> import gtk.gdkgl

Do you get an error message for any of them ?

Not applicable anymore, Chess no longer requires these dependencies.