Chess Interfaces

FirstLinux Review
(06/22/01)
By Dave Jones
Introduction

It used to be that to find human chess opponents you had to visit your local chess club for a game. With the creation of the first Internet Chess Server (ICS) back in 1992, chess against humans could be played from the comfort of your own home. Linux users need a break, from their daily system administration, wordprocessing and programming chores, like everyone else. What better way of having some fun by playing a friendly game of chess with someone who lives in a different continent. Nowadays ICS is extremely popular with hundreds of people to play chess ranging from Grandmasters to absolute beginners.

To play chess over the internet you need to obtain a chess client which logs you into a chess server. There are a wide range of servers on the net, ranging from the commercial Internet Chess Club, to numerous free chess servers. The focus of this review is to compare and contrast the four main Linux chess interfaces on the Free Internet Chess Server. Although no longer released under the GPL, FICS is the most popular non-commercial chess server on the net.

We also wanted to review two veteran chess interfaces, xics and cics, but they no longer work with chess servers. The FICS server is constantly being updated with new features and bug fixes so under these conditions it is almost inevitable xics and cics would stop working as an internet chess client, especially as development of these clients ceased many years ago. So for this review we will examine four Linux Internet Chess Clients: xboard, eboard, Gnome Chess and ics.el. It is also possible to connect to FICS with the telnet program but this is not recommended; a graphical interface is an absolute necessity.

All of the interfaces under review can use timeseal, which is a separate program that compensates for the transmission times of moves. Without timeseal you can lose games solely because your connection to the server is slow. That’s simply not cricket
The table below shows which of these interfaces are included in the mainstream Linux distributions (Debian, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake). The number in the bracket represents the version of the chess software that is supplied with the distribution:-

Interface Distribution
Xboard Debian 2.2r3 (4.0.5), RedHat 7.1 (4.1.0), Mandrake 8.0 (4.2.2), Slackware (4.0.2), SuSE 7.2 (4.2.3)
eboard None
Gnome Chess Debian 2.2r3 (0.2.4), Mandrake 8.0 (0.2.4)
ics.el None