Chess

Introduction
To play chess on a Gentoo machine you need a chess interface (to show the chess board and pieces) and a chess engine (to play the moves). Xboard and Eboard are common chess interfaces, while crafty, arasan, phalanx or gnuchess are used as chess engines. If you want to open and edit chess databases, you can use scid or chessx.

Installation
To install the chess interface:
 * Xboard:
 * eboard:

To install the chess engine:
 * crafty: See for further info: http://www.cis.uab.edu/info/faculty/hyatt/craftydoc.html
 * phalanx:
 * Arasan: There is no ebuild for arasan, but compiling is trivial. See http://www.arasanchess.org/ for the sources and some further info. I installed arasan in /usr/local/games/arasan-8.4.0.

Remember, in order to play games, you have to be in the 'games' group:

xboard and crafty are installed in /usr/games/bin/. The directory /usr/games/bin may not be in your $PATH variable. If so, append it to your path by typing, if you use bash:

Playing
When playing, you have to combine the chess interface and the chess engine. Eboard defines the chess engine in its graphical options. Xboard defines the chess engine in the command line with the fcp (Fist Chess Program) option. We use xboard in the following examples:

Crafty
The resign option controls how quickly crafty will resign. Higher values make crafty more stubborn. Permanent options can be defined in. To use crafty Opening Book you have to download the file from ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/book/ and play crafty from the directory where you stored the opening book. could be a good directory where to keep the opening book. If you decide to save the game, the files 'game.???' and 'log.???' will be created in the playing directory.

This is a basic script that goes to the directory containing the opening book and alternates playing white and black: /usr/local/bin/XboardCrafty.sh

Arasan
Change the path to the if necessary. You might want to change some of arasan's default behavior. To establish this, edit the file, which is in the directory. For instance to turn resignation off, set: arasan.rc

Missing Fonts in Xboard
Some People get an error like this: X Error of failed request: BadName (named color or font does not exist). The reason is, that either both, the font-adobe-100dpi and the font-adobe-75dpi are not installed, or more likely only the 100dpi package is missing, but the fontpath to the 100dpi fonts is given in the xorg.conf. To solve the problem, first make sure that you have installed the font-adobe75dpi package. If not:

If you want the 100dpi-fonts too:

Then include in the path to the fonts:

Finally restart your xserver.

Links

 * Document Retrieved from http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Chess)