Free chess software for linux

Fantasy Chess is a chess game environment with a game server, GTK GUI, private and public AI, and a lot of libraries to help developers.

Vulcan Chess project allows you play against the computer in a chess variant inspired by a certain well-known science-fiction TV series.
Enhancements:
- Castling was added.
- The legal move generator is a bit faster.

CHEOPS Chess project is a C++ chess engine.

CHEOPS (CHEss OPponent Simulator), or Χεοψ, is a fully-functional AI chess program capable of human vs. human, human vs. computer, and computer vs. computer play. It uses a 64-square linear array board representation.

The game tree search is alpha-beta, and the static evaluation function considers material, mobility, and motif features.

CHEOPS comes with extensive documentation on the program internals, aimed at students or programmers wishing to understand or extend the system.

3D Python OpenGL Chess Game project is a 3D chess game in Python with OpenGL.

3D Python OpenGL Chess Game is a normal chess game that has no computer player (yet). You can play against a friend on your PC.

MKGI Chess Club is a chess playing server with a pure Web interface.
It features complete player profile management, full html email notification with embedded board display.
MKGI Chess Club also features an interface to match against chess engines such as gnuchess, phalanx, and crafty.
Enhancements:
- Fixed the notification feature which was broken since 1.6.0.
- Fixed undo availability immediately after a move.
- Implemented partial dragndrop of pieces on the chess board.

Emacs Chess is an object-oriented library written in Elisp for manipulating chess objects (games, plies, positions, etc.), and for displaying them.
Main features:
- Emacs Chess is also an object-oriented library for manipulating chess objects (games, plies, positions, etc), and for displaying them. It supports a wide range of engine objects to use as move sources. This what allows chess.el to act as a chess client.
- chess-announce.el announces your opponents moves verbally, such as "knight takes at f4"provided you have "festival" installed.
- chess-sound.el is similar to chess-announce, but uses specific WAV files for each sound used. It takes up much more disk space, but is nicer to listen to. Available in English only at the moment.
- chess-irc.el provides a tiny IRC bot, allowing you to play games over IRC so long as your opponent enters moves in short algebraic notation. If they dont have chess.el, all they need is a regular chessboard, and a knowledge of SAN (short alegebraic notation).
- chess-ics.el lets you to play on Internet Chess Servers, using chess.el as your chessboard display (which means chess-announce works with it, etc). It has only been tested with FICS so far.
- chess-crafty.el, chess-gnuchess.el and chess-phalanx.el let you play against the Crafty, Gnuchess and Phalanx engines.
- chess-random.el will create Fischer Random positions to play against. Note that this feature only really works against opponents who are also using chess.el. Simply type "S" in the chessboard display buffer to setup a Fischer Random starting position.
- chess-network.el lets you play against other chess.el users directly, over a single open port on the server side. To be a server, you must have "netcat" installed, or be using Emacs 21.3 or higher (which supports server side network sockets). To be a client, all you need is Emacs 21.1 or higher.
- chess-link.el lets you tie two engines together, so that events from one are responded to by events from another. This can let you run a chess bot on your computer over any of the transport, or you can use it to pit two computer chess engines against each other.
- chess.el can even export chessboard display to other X servers, allowing you to play against people in your meeting room, even if they dont have Emacs installed!
Enhancements:
- This maintenance release includes several bugfixes.

IRC-Chess project is a 2-player chess game for IRC which turns a computer into an IRC chess bot.

It consists of a Java chess server, with frontend scripts to convert an IRC client into a chess bot. Players then communicate with the bot using standard IRC commands, and dont require any special software to play.

Frontend scripts are available for IRSSI and X-Chat.

The client is merely responsible for interpreting this data and displaying it. In this way, porting the system to a variety of IRC clients is very simple, since
the client script will be short, and effectively contain no code specific to the game being played.

In other words, the Java part is smart. The script is dumb and is just there to make things look pretty.

This idea works. Currently, client scripts have been designed for RSSI and XChat. Since both these programs use Perl for scripting, the scripts are practically identical, with a few client specific modifications.

Porting this script to other IRC clients shouldnt be too much of a hassle, since its just the frontend thats ported, not the chess game itself. Anyone wanting to create frontend scripts for other IRC clients, please feel free to do so.

The PROTOCOL file describes exactly what needs to be done.