Picochess v4.2.0 is now an official Github release !!!

[Johan Sjöblom]

Antonio's latest web client and all the engines-, books-, etc resource files are now in that official release tag v4.2.0. All official release files and code are now in that one single package.

It took me more than one year to get to this point. Almost 1.000 commits, Picochess in total has over 4.000 commits. This means that Picochess is probably one of the longest privately maintained GitHub repositories.

Some statistics:

- Python lines of code: 35.400

- Shell scripts: 1.983, half of which are install-picochess and install-engines

- HTML: 1.628

- CSS: 3.760

Please post findings, comments, etc here. Picochess 4.2 is alive !

-- Johan

[Javier]

Congratulations Johan, Antonio, Randy... I'm sure I forget my names but thanks to everyone who is making this wonder possible, you are revitalizing a game with centuries of history by giving it new gameplay and learning options. Picochess has changed a lot since the first versions, and I am sure that in this year 2026 you will evolve even more with new ideas and functions that we will all contribute. Thank you for your effort, time and talent. 

Javier 

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[Johan Sjöblom]

Thank you Javier.

Everyone is welcome to contribute. I tried to make a Video using just default built-in gnome recorder so you cannot see the mouse moves, but the video is really small size. Here is the how to create a new issue and PR video:

https://groups.google.com/g/picochess/c/unzg7ICSt_U/m/IAUSw0GrEQAJ

[Etienne Chaffanjon]

Bravo Johan!!! ….. and thanks to all contributors.

Le 25 janv. 2026 à 17:30, Johan Sjöblom <messi...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Antonio's latest web client and all the engines-, books-, etc resource files are now in that official release tag v4.2.0. All official release files and code are now in that one single package.

[Javier]

Good morning ,

Version 4.2.0 for the DGT3000 works very well, has a much improved appearance but is a little unstable. After adjusting personal preferences in both the Picochess menu and the settings gear, after restarting it hangs and does not advance from the DGT Pi screen on the clock, connected to the monitor it cannot connect to the localhost server and does not start Picochess. Running picochess.sh dgt3000 again does not fix the problem. It is necessary to reinstall operating system and start again with the complete installation.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/picochess/PA4PR05MB91386CE41AF41A762B27A2C28E92A%40PA4PR05MB9138.eurprd05.prod.outlook.com.

[Johan Sjöblom]

Would you be able to post the /opt/picochess/logs/picochess.log file so that we can see what went wrong?

[Javier]

Sorry Johan but I can't, . I've already reinstalled Picochess, and now I have no problems. Both the desktop version and the DGT3000 version work fine with Trixie 7 and an RPi4.

I followed your new instructions to auto-launch the kiosk, but I haven't had any success. 

`cp /etc/pico-kiosk.desktop ~/.config/autostart/` tells me that it can't perform stats on `/etc/picochess/desktop` because the file or directory doesn't exist. 

I tried `cp /opt/picochess/etc/pico-kiosk.desktop ~/.config/autostart/`, and I don't get an error message, but the kiosk still doesn't auto-launch.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/picochess/64489fba-feec-451b-a917-836d16bab4fdn%40googlegroups.com.

[Johan Sjöblom]

Sorry about that. My fault. The path in the readme was without full path. I have now updated the readme: https://github.com/JohanSjoblom/picochess?tab=readme-ov-file#kiosk-mode-auto-launch-on-boot

The example start file is in /opt/picochess/etc folder, not in root /etc. Sorry about that!

I have now been fighting 2 hours with getting kiosk mode to work on Bookworm with Wayland, but I cannot recommend trying that. I had to give up because of wayfire.

My recommendation therefore after this struggle: On Bookworm use X11 for kiosk, and yes on your Trixie use Wayland for kiosk.

[Javier]

Hi Johan, 

auto-start of the kiosk mode working without problems with the new instructions. 

 Thank you very much :-)

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/picochess/52e844b4-4217-415b-89a2-764877606ac7n%40googlegroups.com.

[Johan Sjöblom]

I thought I saw a post from Henri here that I did not respond to yet...  Some problems to update from 4.1.7 to 4.2.0

It seems Henri that you had an invalid value for beep-config in your picochess.ini. I don't know how that could have happened during an update.

-- Johan

[Johan Sjöblom]

Learnings from this is that I now added a way to check that your picochess.ini is correct in case picochess does not start. Just run this new checker to verify your picochess.ini file:

/opt/picochess/check-config.sh

It should say "Config check OK"