Rodent II is an open source chess engine by Pawel Koziol, licensed under GPL 3.0. It is based on a much weaker engine Sungorus 1.4 by Pablo Vazquez. It is designed to allow the user to vary its playing strength and characteristics by allowing the user to set a wide variety of variables affecting the engine's play. These can also be pre-set by the user through the use of a number of personality files.

Rodent II is a UCI protocol compliant chess engine. It is operated through a command line interface. If the user wants to have a graphical user interface, Rodent II can be used with chess GUI programs such as Knights (KDE), glChess (Gnome), pyChess (Gnome) or other UCI compliant chess GUI program.

To use Rodent II in Linux, it first must be compiled. Go to the sources directory and from the command line type:

make

This will compile the program and create an executable file called rodentII. It will also create the basic.ini file.

To install the files from the command line type:

make install

You may require super user or administrative rights to install the files. The rodentII file will be installed into /usr/bin and the books, personalities and basic.ini files will be installed into a data directory /usr/share/rodentII. You are now ready to play. See the rodent documents for further information on Rodent II playing styles.

note: The compiled program assumes the data directory is /usr/share/rodentII. If you wish to use a different directory, edit the variable DATADIR in file Makefile before compiling. The install program assumes the executable directory /usr/bin. To use a different directory, edit the variable BINDIR in file Makefile before installing.