Free chess software for linux

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.

BabyChess is a chess program. You can edit chess games, play chess on the internet, and play locally against engines.
BabyChess is distributed as free software under the terms of the GNU GPL.
Main features:
- Games between humans and/or engines can be played in the match window. XBoard engines are supported.
- The chess position editor lets you edit a chess position, and save it in FEN notation, as used by other chess programs.
- The chess game editor understands PGN notation.
- The game archive editor reads PGN files that contain any number of chess games. It displays a list of all games and lets you edit those games using the game editor.
- The ICS client connects you to an Internet Chess Server and lets you play games against human opponents.
- The "evaluator" of BabyChess is a chess engine that uses its own communication protocol. It is not an XBoard engine. This program is given a FEN position as an argument and analyzes the position. During the thinking process, information about the current best move and more is written.
- The game editor uses the chess evaluator to analyze chess positions.
- Internally, the evaluator uses 64 bit numbers even on 32 bit systems, meaning it is possible to analyze more than 2 billion positions on PCs.
- This program implements an XBoard chess engine. It uses the evaluator as a backend.
- In addition to the standard algebraic notation (SAN). French, German and Dutch notations are supported. Figurine notation is also supported, also the current fonts dont make it look good. New notations can be created.

Chessweb is a J2EE chess game Website. It is a pure Java servlet implementation of a two-player chess game.

Two players log into the Web site, see an image of the current board in their browser, and make their moves.

The differentiating features of chessweb (e.g. versus WinBoard / XBoard) is that its an extremely lightweight implementation written completely in Java (nothing more than an app server and browser is required).

Furthermore, the client end is DHTML only, and verified to works with FireFox 1.0.6 and IE 6.

VDB Chinese Chess is a Chinese chess program which uses pictures instead of Chinese letters so people who arent Chinese can play it. VDB Chinese Chess supports 99 levels and different computer levels can play against each other.
Installation :
Step 1: Make sure that all necessary components are installed!
This program needs:
1. g++: Gnu c++ support including header files
2. xaw3d: 3D-extension for the Athena Widget Set if you cannot find it you can change xaw3d by xaw in src/Makefile.in but the program will not look so nicely
3. Standard Template Library
Actually this program will use only one header file for the function max(), that returns the maximum of two values. You can implement that yourself. 4. xpm: this is a library for icons in x- all board pieces are implemented with this library, this library is very common under X, so it should be included in your distribution 5. pthread: this is used for multithreading, sometimes also called pthreads, you might have to change this in your src/Makefile.in
Step 2:download this program and unzip it in the directory you want to run it. There is NO separate installation directory! tar xfz cchess.tar.gz
Step 3: cd cchess_dist/cchess
Step 4: ./configure
make
make install
Rules of Chinese Chess:
Indeed, Chinese Chess is very similar to Chess but there are some differences according how to move your pieces on the board and the following:
1. You cannot exchange the pawn against some other piece if you reach the end of the board
2. There is no rochade and moving "en passant"
3. You lose the game also if you are stalemate
4. If both kings are on the same column there must be one piece between them
5. If there is three times the same position because of the same moves you must move different next time
6. The pieces are not black and white but red and black. Red moves first.
There are the following important locations:
The two palaces, each consists of nine fields marked by two diagonal lines.
The river: The area in the middle of the board, that is not interrupted by lines
The pieces on the board move the following way:
King: Can only move one field forward or to the side, not diagonal. Has to stay inside the palace
Pawn: Moves one field forward. If he is beyond the river he can also moves side wards
Rock: Moves one or more fields to the side, forward, backward but not diagonal
Cannon: Moves one or more fields to the side, forward, backward but not diagonal. Must always jump over one piece!
Horse: Moves one field straight, one field diagonal, cannot move over another piece.
Elephant: Moves exactly 2 fields diagonal, cannot move over the river
Mandarin: Has to stay inside the palace. Moves one field diagonal.
Enhancements:
- This release fixes some defects in the game strategy.

Chess Training Tools is a collection of chess training tools. It includes a chess visualization trainer that teaches chess visualization by drilling you on the color of a particular square, and also on your ability to tell if two squares are the same color, if two (or three) squares are on the same diagonal, if two squares are a knight move apart, or if two squares are two knight moves apart.
This is a program that I wrote for my own use to improve my chess visualization ability. I decided to share it with other players, since I believe they can benefit from it. It basically helps you remember what color the squares are, how the pieces move, and so on, all in your head.
It does so by posing you various excercises that, if practiced every day, will let you visualize positions without the aid of a board.
I use this tool every day. You may want to use it the way I do, or you could develop your own method of training. I work my way through the panels, doing 20 of each excercise. I proceed Color->Same Color->Diagonal 2->Diagonal 3->Knight->Knight 2->Mate.
Then, after all of that I play a game against Vince. Start slow, by either lagging the display by one ply, or by blanking out one quadrant. Work your way up to the 7 ply and four quadrants.
Enhancements:
- This release added undo, or move takeback to the PlayTest ("Vince").

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.

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

Java-Chess project is a standalone Java chess program.

Java-Chess is a fully-featured chess program that uses using Java 1.2 (including Swing) and 64-bit computing where possible.

The goal of the Java-Chess project is to develop an OpenSource chess application written in Java. We want to demonstrate that Java can be tuned to a point, where it is almost up to the performance of an application, that was directly compiled to native code.

Even clean object-oriented design does not necessarily generate an overhead, that makes high-performance computing virtually impossible.