Free how to play chess software for linux

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.

Autoplay project connects two xboard/winboard protocol complaint chess engines and lets them play against each other. The result will be logged in a easily parseable logfile and after the result of the game is known, a specific exit-code is returned (0=white won, 1=black won, etc).

How to run it?

GNUChess versus Pos

autoplay -1 "gnuchess -x " -2 "java -Xmx256M -jar pos --io-mode xboard" -r -l gnuchess_v_pos.log

Sjeng versus GNUChess
autoplay -1 sjeng -2 "gnuchess -x" -l sjeng_v_gnuchess.log

Engines running on seperate computers

This example runs gnuchess on computer B with white and sjeng on computer A with black:

Computer B (slave):
autoplay -P 7788 -0 "gnuchess -x"

Computer A (master):
autoplay -1 "client:B:7788" -2 "sjeng" -v -r

HellChess project is a freeware chess program that guides beginners through the game, while intermediate and expert players can evaluate their level of play and match wits with the opponent available in HellChess or online on the net.
HellChess is the first project that is using the full features of the BraatWorst engine and serves as an perfect example of the capabilities this engine can provide.
Main features:
Perfect online teaching while chatting to trainee in the game.
- Using HellChess one can give online training to students that are willing to learn chess. The teacher can setup a chessboard while chatting to the trainee. The trainee will see the chessboard being setup while the teacher is placing his pieces. This is really helpfull to both trainee and teacher. If a trainee does a bad move, the teacher can undo his move and explain why using the edit board or the chat function.
Battle between different computers
- Tired of your friends claiming their machine is better than yours ? Why not let it play against a friends computer ? You can let HellChess play against the other machine using the networking option. Whoever wins will have the better machine and youll earn respect.
Bored waiting ?
- Now you can install HellChess on your PocketPC and tickle your brain whenever you have to wait. Youll be surprised how quickly time passes when battling your pieces on the board against the CPU. And now with the new games Othello and Connect4 you can also play a different kind of game whenever youve had enough chess battles.
Enhancements:
- The game can now also play Chinese chess, Japanese chess, and Checkers.
- Built-in documentation that explains all of the game rules was included along with several tutorials for learning these games.
- The skin was changed.

Tonic Chess project is an online chess software.

Tonic is a graphical interface for playing online chess. It is based on Jin.

From now on Tonic is really open source software (and free as in libre as well) - I managed (I had some problems last time I tried) to import source to cvs sourceforge repository. It is a bridge2 release source with few little modifications. You can read how to get it from cvs here. If you are impatient pastenenter in console:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tonic-chess.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tonic-chess login

When prompted for password just hit enter. And then:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tonic-chess.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tonic-chess co -P tonic

You should see a list of files downloaded from cvs repository. If you are a non-console user (i.e. Windows or Mac user) I recommend visiting this site. I myself use Linux for development. And Netbeans sometimes as you could figure out from examining the contents of tonic directory. So, enjoy the opensourceness of Tonic!

I uploaded new screenshot to Tonic project site. It is Tonic in Aero GTK engine tuxedo. Quite a peculiar engine imo, but you can use other GTK engines if you run Tonic in Java 6 aka Mustang (you know you can get it from here, dont you?) I test Tonic with Mustang and Ive problems with tray icon. After some searching Ive realized why Tonic crashed under Java 6 - the problem was tray.jar plugin and its dependencies - tray.so or tray.dll, so if you want to run Tonic on Java 6 move them away from theirs directory. Ive written a class for tray icon using new desktop API from Mustang, but it doesnt work as expected in KDE (tray icon is invisible) ; GNOME is better, but I have to work on the popup menu. Well, what could I say? Mustang is in beta stage, but it has some goodies to wait for (early splashscreen, access to tab component, ...).

Ruby Chess is a chess game implemented in Ruby using GTK2. Ruby Chess project has a good artificial intelligence that is heuristic-based and stochastic.

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.

PicoChess project is a small chess program.

PicoChess will support one and two player games, as well as playing against itself. It can also load and save games, and export transcripts of games.