XBoard
From LinuxReviews
XBoard is the standard chess game for playing chess on Linux computers. It's not very fancy, it's not got a trendy look, but it's great for playing chess. And it supports all the commonly used chess engines available.
[edit] Starting XBoard
You can select chess engine to play against from the command-line. It starts Gnuchess if no other engine is specified.
To start Crafty:
xboard -fcp 'crafty xboard'
The -tcp option supports many arguments, for example:
xboard -fcp 'crafty xboard hash=12M hashp=5M'
Phalanx:
xboard -fcp phalanx
You can also connect to a chess server, which must also be given as a command-line argument. For eaxmple:
xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org
