I have made some changes to my Certabo, Millennium and Novag (Citrine and UCB) drivers. They now provide more information during the process of connecting to the board and there have been a few small bug fixes. However the main change is that they also now run on Linux. The only GUI that currently supports this is LucasChess since Arena for Linux has its DGT support hard coded into the program and Shredder for Linux currently has no eBoard support.

The new drivers are already included in LucasChess from version 1.27 or they can be downloaded from my web page:

https://goneill.co.nz/chess.php

Unfortunately DGT never released the Rabbit Plugin for Linux, which meant that LucasChess could support the other boards but not DGT. So I decided to write my own DGT driver. Of course it also works on Windows, so it can be used as an alternative to the Rabbit program if desired. Differences you might notice:

• In LucasChess take back moves are handled automatically while in Rabbit you need to coordinate the take backs on the board with clicking the "Takeback" button on the screen.
  
• In LucasChess special starting positions are sent to my driver using FEN so castling, en passant rules etc are obeyed. Rabbit only uses the piece positions.
  
• In Shredder the DGT clock can be used to rewind the times to the start of your move when making a computer move on the board so you don't lose time moving the computers pieces.
  
• Once in take back mode my screen shows the next take back move on the screen.
  
• My program can show moves on the DGT3000 clock using SAN but always shows the piece character in upper case. Rabbit shows black pieces in lower case. (For some reason, that really annoys me!)

Like the other drivers it works in LucasChess, Arena and Shredder on Windows and LucasChess on Linux. I have tested it with a Smart Board and DGT3000 clock, and I'm told it also works with USB and Bluetooth. I think it will work with DGTXL clocks and Revelation boards but haven't been able to test these. Again, this driver is included in LucasChess 1.27

There are some notes about these new drivers as there are some things I haven't worked out yet and some things I couldn't test:

All drivers (Linux)
On some PCs these seem to run OK, on others they don't start at all. If you find they don't start try running:

sudo apt install libqt5pas1

I have been told that on some systems the font is very small. I will look into this and try to fix it in the next release.

DGT Bluetooth (Windows/Linux)
I have been told that it works with these boards but I have also been told that you need the DGT Live programming running at the same time in order to see the COM port (ttyACM0). Try it and see!

Certabo Bluetooth (Linux)
This uses the BlueZ library which may, or may not, already be installed on your PC. To avoid causing any issues to other parts of LucasChess at the moment I have kept it separate so to use BT you need to:
Rename LucasChessR/bin/OS/linux/DigitalBoards/libcer.so to something else
Rename LucasChessR/bin/OS/linux/DigitalBoards/libcerBT.so to libcer.so
If it doesn't work try running

sudo apt-get install libbluetooth-dev

In Arena and Shredder my driver works by replacing a file (DGTEBDLL.dll) in the program directory. This works well if you only have one type of board but gets difficult if you have several boards that you want to use in these programs as you need to keep track of which driver is currently installed. So I have written a program to allow people with multiple boards to manage the DLL files:

https://goneill.co.nz/chess.php#dllmanager

This isn't a problem in LucasChess since that program has a menu to select the type of board you are using.

I have updated my drivers.

There was a bug in the DGT driver that stopped you from playing with the black pieces nearest you and that has been fixed. The Millennium connection code has been improved too so hopefully it will be more reliable.

The main changes relate to using the drivers with the Shredder GUI.

With the boards that have piece recognition (Certabo, DGT, Millennium) if the board is activated and you remove the last piece from the board then the driver will go into a Setup mode. Here you can create a new position by placing the pieces where you want them on the board. The last piece you place on the board should be the king of the colour to move. After that you can start playing (if playing against an engine) or moving the pieces (if analysing the position).

Also in Shredder I noticed that when you take back moves the clock doesn't get rewound. Since my DGT driver already handled the clocks in Shredder I copied some of the code from that into the other drivers so that the clocks automatically move back too. This is now different to using Shredder without a board where the take back move button leaves the clocks counting down without rewinding.