Chess

From openSUSE

Linux chess software generally is separated into:

• A front end application:
  • Xboard which runs in any Xwindows environment - rpm available SUSE 10.x
  • Knights http://knights.klik.atekon.de/ for KDE - rpm available SUSE 10.x
  • Gnome-chess http://primates.ximian.com/~jpr/gnome-chess/ for Gnome
• A chess engine of which there are many, including some commercial that can interact with the above front ends as they use the Xboard protocol.
  • Crafty rpm in standard openSUSE 10.2 repository
  • GNUChess rpm in standard openSUSE 10.3 repository
  • Phalanx XXII rpm in standard openSUSE 10.2 & 10.3 repositories

Implementation Catches

The software might have bugs. For example Knights is unstable in openSUSE 10.3 and stable in 10.2. The stability issue may be resolved by installing jack audio libraries. Xboard defaults to using crafty which is fine in openSUSE 10.2 as it is supplied, but as it is not in default openSUSE 10.3 you have to set it up to call GNUChess vis:

 xboard -fcp gnuchessx -fd /usr/share/gnuchess -size medium