Chess programs

[Olavi Halme]

Hello friends,

I am a chess player from Finland and have operated many years with
Fedora. My last system is Fedora 14 x86_64 and I have been very
satisfied to it. But I have noticed that Fedora has only gnuchess and
something other chess program.

Have you plans to publish official chess programs for e. Scid and
Stockfish? These programs are modern and efficient programs and have
published in many other Linux systems. But why not in Fedora?

Best regards,
Olavi Halme

[Jon Ciesla]

Olavi Halme wrote:
> Hello friends,
>
> I am a chess player from Finland and have operated many years with
> Fedora. My last system is Fedora 14 x86_64 and I have been very
> satisfied to it. But I have noticed that Fedora has only gnuchess and
> something other chess program.
>
> Have you plans to publish official chess programs for e. Scid and
> Stockfish? These programs are modern and efficient programs and have
> published in many other Linux systems. But why not in Fedora?
>
> Best regards,
> Olavi Halme
>
> games mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/games

I suspect that the sets of people who know about and are interested in 
these games, and those who package for Fedora, have not yet overlapped.  
If you can provide me URLs, I will take a look and possibly package them.

Thanks,
J

[Jon Ciesla]

Jon Ciesla wrote:
> Olavi Halme wrote:
> > Hello friends,
> >
> > I am a chess player from Finland and have operated many years with
> > Fedora. My last system is Fedora 14 x86_64 and I have been very
> > satisfied to it. But I have noticed that Fedora has only gnuchess and
> > something other chess program.
> >
> > Have you plans to publish official chess programs for e. Scid and
> > Stockfish? These programs are modern and efficient programs and have
> > published in many other Linux systems. But why not in Fedora?
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Olavi Halme
> >
> > games mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/games
>
> I suspect that the sets of people who know about and are interested in 
> these games, and those who package for Fedora, have not yet overlapped.  
> If you can provide me URLs, I will take a look and possibly package them.
>
> Thanks,
> J

Can someone else on the list forward my reply?  Olavi's email server 
won't accept email from my IP, despite it being on a business-class DSL 
static IP <grumble>

-J

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 09:35:56 +0200,
  Olavi Halme  wrote:
> Hello friends,
>
> I am a chess player from Finland and have operated many years with
> Fedora. My last system is Fedora 14 x86_64 and I have been very
> satisfied to it. But I have noticed that Fedora has only gnuchess and
> something other chess program.

'chess' is completely broken after F14. Upstream is dead and it needs to
be updated for more recent cegui and ogre. I still hope to do that, but
I haven't had time to work on it for quite a while.

'pychess' was recently orphaned, but might get picked up again.

'knights' is a fairly recent addition.

There could be other ones I am not aware of.

I don't play much chess, so I don't have recommendations for how any of these
fare against each other.

Be aware that Fedora only includes 'free' (freedom) software. Programs
that are commercial or free for noncommercial use, are not 'free' even if
there is no charge for them and will not be included in Fedora.

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

Install gnome-games-extra, that one has glchess, which is quite
nice, note that you can enable a 3d view (if you prefer) from
the menus.

Regards,

Hans

On 03/24/2011 04:21 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 09:35:56 +0200,
>    Olavi Halme  wrote:
> > Hello friends,
> >
> > I am a chess player from Finland and have operated many years with
> > Fedora. My last system is Fedora 14 x86_64 and I have been very
> > satisfied to it. But I have noticed that Fedora has only gnuchess and
> > something other chess program.
>
> 'chess' is completely broken after F14. Upstream is dead and it needs to
> be updated for more recent cegui and ogre. I still hope to do that, but
> I haven't had time to work on it for quite a while.
>
> 'pychess' was recently orphaned, but might get picked up again.
>
> 'knights' is a fairly recent addition.
>
> There could be other ones I am not aware of.
>
> I don't play much chess, so I don't have recommendations for how any of these
> fare against each other.
>
> Be aware that Fedora only includes 'free' (freedom) software. Programs
> that are commercial or free for noncommercial use, are not 'free' even if
> there is no charge for them and will not be included in Fedora.
> _______________________________________________
> games mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/games

[Callum Lerwick]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Olavi Halme  wrote:
> Have you plans to publish official chess programs for e. Scid and
> Stockfish? These programs are modern and efficient programs and have
> published in many other Linux systems. But why not in Fedora?

For those who don't know, since chess is such a well defined and
universal game, basically all computer chess programs are divided into
seperate UI and engine processes, communicating with a standard
protocol. In fact, most engine developers don't bother writing GUIs at
all, and vice versa, so you have to mix and match.

There are two protocols in use, "Xboard/Winboard/Chess Engine
Communication Protocol", which is basically just GNU Chess's text
interface, which has been around a long time and is widely supported
in the open source world, but is a bit hacky having not been designed
to be a universal standard in the first place. Then there's UCI, a
newer better protocol, which does not yet seem to be widely supported
in the open source world. We don't seem to have anything supporting it
in Fedora yet, however a Xboard/UCI adapter exists:

http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/PolyGlot.html

Stockfish is generally considered the strongest open source engine
right now, and is a UCI engine, and Scid is an open source "chess
database" that apparently also acts as an Xboard/UCI GUI. Getting Scid
into the distribution is probably a good start.

I'm completely terrible at chess, I'm lucky if I can beat GNU chess on
gnome chess's easy setting (only look two moves ahead) so I have not
had a burning desire to get any strong engines into the
distribution... :)