Chess for serious players?

cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

I've used a few chess programs for linux and they all lacked something (or a lot). Most had buggy interfaces. Others had poor engines. And still others were written more as a side project and not meant for serious play and/or study. Chessmaster comes to mind for the Windows crowd however I prefer something more along the lines of Fritz. Does anyone know of a comparable program for linux? If there isn't, is there an ongoing forum to push developers to look at the linux community? I just had a chess twitch today and, sadly, remembered that nothing exists. I understand that one could use wine, but that is a work around in my opinion. Any comments would be appreciated.
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Reikinio · Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 12:46 am Post subject:

what about gnuchess and crafty ?

cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

I don't recall xboard being a pleasure to work with, but ... I was running an older computer with SuSE installed. I just installed gnuchess and using my own board which works just fine for my needs. I've only briefly kept up with chess apps in linux since my SuSE install (which was a source of a lot of frustration). Either way, thanks for the nudge.
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Reikinio · Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:40 am Post subject:

no problem,
Here are some alternatives to xboard if you don't like its look and feel,
http://freshmeat.net/projects/glchess/
or if you use KDE:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/slibo/

nbkolchin · Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 6:58 am Post subject:

eboard for playing.
scid for analyzing.

Both support crafty engine.

MetalGod · Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 10:57 am Post subject:

crafty is a powerful engine-
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cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

Thanks for the responses. I'll have to give crafty a shot over the weekend.
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fe · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 11 Location: Italy

You can run windows-only UCI chess engines (eg. shredder) in scid, using wine and a protocol UCI-to-Xboard adapter called polyglot.
If anybody cares, i can put together an howto

cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

That'd be interesting. However, in my case, amd64 and wine don't play well together. But, that's another issue.
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fe · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 11 Location: Italy

I did a little bit of research and i'm happy to announce, that finally a strong linux native gpl'd chess engine is available.
Its name is Fruit 2.1, a UCI engine which arrived second at the recent 13th world computer chess championship
( http://www.ru.is/wccc05/default.asp?Page=Notepad&ID=3 ) scoring 8.5/11, one point ahead of well known Shredder.
It's also already reaching the top of computer chess rating lists, competing with latest Fritz and Shredder.

This is the page where you can download Fruit and Polyglot (the uci2wb adapter which will make it run together with
scid, eboard, etc..)

http://arctrix.com/nas/fruit/

have fun

ryoshu · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2005 Posts: 4 Location: Polska

New project, next generation for scid, if you want to help feel free

http://newscid.sourceforge.net/
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khiloa · Guru Joined: 27 Jan 2004 Posts: 333 Location: Florence, SC

crafty and glchess look like a sweet combonation, I will have to try them out sometime.

indianiec · Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 11:18 pm Post subject:

coming soon: http://www.shredderchess.com/news.html

MJOE · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2005 Posts: 3

When I was at ohio state, I was one of the top chess players there. This interests me.

Do they have an exact date of the release?
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Vanquirius · Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2005 2:37 am Post subject:

Experimental ebuild for glchess in bug 107056.
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srz · Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 7:04 am Post subject:

Shredder for Linux available: http://www.shredderchess.com/linux.html

Paul Yard · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 106

I have a questions abount chess and I think this is the right place.
I use Crafty for analyzing (with scid) but I noted there is no opening book available in portage. I found some instructions in Internet on how to create the book downloading some files: small.zip, medium.zip or large(1, 2, 3).zip but I could not find them. I seems the links where superseded.
Anybody knows where to get a good book? ... and how to install it?
For playing on freechess I use jin. It's OK and fast enough on my machine.

thanks
pcs

cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

I still haven't had the opportunity to really explore the apps mentioned here. With regards to opening books, there is gnuchess-book which is an opening book for gnuchess. Whether or not it can plug into craft/scid or if you can just use the file itself and coerce it, I do not know.

gour · Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 11:09 am Post subject: Re: wow

j_c_p · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 4:58 am Post subject:

Whaou

:

http://img208.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose7so.png
http://img229.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose78df.png
http://img220.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose114my.png
http://img206.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose102ah.png

Very nice to have such great program under linux.

Enjoy Jose :wink:

.
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gour · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 7:21 am Post subject:

j_c_p · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:29 am Post subject:

Well, i have installed Jose in another directory than home, but it has the same properties (in fact, /mnt/divers/test/chess/jose :lol:

).

Last shot : http://img483.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jose199ai.png

To launch it, i do the following : /usr/local/jdk1.5.0_06/jre/bin/java -jar /mnt/divers/test/chess/jose/jose.jar (with a local 32 bits jsdk, because i'm running Gentoo x86_64 with 1.4.2 64 bits java sdk).
I have noticed that 32 bits jsdk is a necessity for 3D board.

No problem for me in order to run Jose (and i try several AI as you can see above).

regards,

jcp.
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gour · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:44 am Post subject:

j_c_p · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:58 am Post subject:

For an ebuild, i don't know, but i can try to do one in a few days in order to test the ebuild process (however, jsdk 32 bits would be necessary indeed).

I've seen Fruit-2.2.1 too, but i'm not a great chess player, at the moment i'm trying different AI, to see which one is not too strong for me :lol:

.

best,

jcp.
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gour · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 9:19 am Post subject: