After installing Crafty on Debian in the previous post I happily got playing, but had ignored two errors that came back to haunt me.

The first was the error message:

libnuma: Warning: /sys not mounted or no numa system. Assuming one node: No such file or directory
 

Hot on the heels of this message comes:

unable to open book file [./book.bin].
book is disabled
unable to open book file [./books.bin].
 

With another one or two of the first error message interspersed.  What???

For those of you on a first-name basis with Linus Torvalds, this might not be so obscure, but I was lost.  Turns out the first "Numa" issue can be safely (hopelessly?) ignored because either you've got it or not according to a thread that finishes with an explanation of said numa technology.  Looks like I haven't got it, so I ignored it.

On to the second one.  Fortunately, I'm not the first person to have run into this.  Over on this thread the problem was posted and then solved by the wonderful bugsduggan.  This worked wonders and the linked thread explained things nicely.  However, I apparently was still missing the book files themselves and couldn't seem to find them anywhere online - or if I could they were for the wrong version of Crafty!

Finally, I poked around Dr. Hyatt's FTP site and found the location with help from the read.me file.  Voila, there were all three files in the books directory: ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/book/

I downloaded those three to the ~/.crafty directory created by the setup_crafty.sh script, ran Crafty and it worked!