Chess games
From LinuxReviews
There is really only one good chess game, or more correctly, interface for GNU/Linux: XBoard.
Contents |
[edit] How you should think about Linux Chess games
XBoard is basically a program which displays the chess board. It also allows you to play against a computer chess engine or a local or remote human adversary.
The software chess interfaces such as XBoard use to figure out what the computer opponent should do are the chess engines. There are several available, most of which are much likely better than you in chess.
[edit] The Interfaces
In bullet summary, there's only Knights and XBoard. However, there are many other choices available who could become better alternatives if someone with wild coding skills gave them time and attention.
[edit] XBoard
XBoard is a very old chess interface. It's not very fancy, or flashy, but it has all the basic features of a modern chess program: You can play against all commonly used chess engines and connect to Internet chess servers.
[edit] Knights
Knights is a very nice KDE chess game[1]. The last version (0.6.4-beta) was released in January of 2005. Development seems to have stalled. It supports themes, loading and saving of games, chess engines and Internet chess servers. It's the best chess interface available todya.
[edit] Gnome-Chess
Gnome Chess[2] is/was a GNOME chess interface which was last updated in January of 2001. It's GNU, and the source is out there, so someone could possibly make a Gnome 2.x version and update it. It's not worth considering if you just want to play chess.
[edit] Slibo
Slibo[3] is a OpenGL 3D chess interface for KDE which could have turned out to be the coolest Chess engine in the universe. The project is very dead at this point and the last version (0.4.4) was released in August 2003. It doesn't compile against KDE 3.5, and this won't be fixed since the project is dead and unmaintained. Again, the source code is there, it's likely interesting and has value to programmers, but it's not a choice if just want to play some chess.
[edit] PyChess
PyChess[4] is a gnomebased chessclient written in python. It's GPL and is very much alive as of November 2007. The goal of PyChess, is to provide a fully featured, nice looking, easy to use chess client for the gnome-desktop. It has got a rich animated interface, with features such as internetplay over FICS and supports the xboard cecp engine protocol as well as the uci protocol.
