Your chess setup?

[kno712]

I'm afraid that, in my honest opinion, the best chess programs are for the Win$ platform; you can use wine and arena (www.playwitharena.com); it is free, you can use UCI or winboard engines and you can download a good opening book as well; I use babaschess as well (www.babaschess.net); it is very good for playing chess in FICS. This last one I have installed in linux and it rus fine son far.

pychess will be a good program but still is a early development stage; I've heard about csboard, but I haven't tried it myself.

[buntu_hugenewbie11]

With 3dchess I get the following error:
Your system does not have the required software to enable 3D mode. Please contact your system administrator and ask them to install the OpenGL Python bindings and the GtkGLExt Python bindings

Anyone know what I need to get and install?
I'm using fiesty.

[jmelton]

Rybka is by far the best chess engine in the world. I haven't tried running it in Linux yet, but it should run fine under most chess GUIs (any that are UCI) that run in Linux.

[buntu_hugenewbie11]

You need wine for Rybka though is it worth it?

[DoktorSeven]

Originally Posted by buntu_hugenewbie11 With 3dchess I get the following error: Your system does not have the required software to enable 3D mode. Please contact your system administrator and ask them to install the OpenGL Python bindings and the GtkGLExt Python bindings Anyone know what I need to get and install? I'm using fiesty.

Not sure if the packages are the same as in Debian but you need something like python-opengl and python-gtkglext1. Search using synaptic, you should be able to find packages with these or similar names.

[buntu_hugenewbie11]

Yeah I tried those: the GLgext package doesn't seem to exist.
Could it be something with my nvidia card?

[DoktorSeven]

Well, you will likely need a working 3d environment but if the game actually tells you that you need those two things, then it wasn't able to find them and you do need to install them.

Did you try enabling universe/multiverse repos (search for info)? Maybe it's in there.

Also, see this: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ticket/4469 ; are you running 64 bit? Might be out of luck according to that.

[buntu_hugenewbie11]

Thanks- I am running a 64bit --> guess that makes sense. Hope they get it going soon.

[nabla]

In Ubuntu just eboard for FICS, Crafty as engine but I don't use it much. I keep a windows partition for chessbase, fritz, etc.

[Grigorius]

Originally Posted by kno712 I'm afraid that, in my honest opinion, the best chess programs are for the Win$ platform; you can use wine and arena (www.playwitharena.com); it is free, you can use UCI or winboard engines and you can download a good opening book as well; I use babaschess as well (www.babaschess.net); it is very good for playing chess in FICS. This last one I have installed in linux and it rus fine son far. pychess will be a good program but still is a early development stage; I've heard about csboard, but I haven't tried it myself.

I agree the best chess interface is the Fritz interface and I think basically all the ChessBase software is a step or two above the competition. In windows (xp) I use Fritz 10 (the interface + engine, I also have Rybka and Hiarcs ...)

I also tried to experiment a bit with FICS and the software available for linux ... SCID for the database, I use Crafty, GNUchess and Fruit in combination with Gnomechess - witch comes with Ubuntu, I use Toga2 in combination with Arena - and this works well with wine, and to play on the internet I tried Jing but I didn't like it I didn't like X-board either so I settled with Varese (Varese is only meant to work with the FICS server: http://varese.home.att.net/ ) ... however I still boot win to play chess because there is no good substitute for Chessbase + I have many training DVD-s that won't play in linux (I was able to install Chessbasereader but it hangs when I try to open a DVD ... and as far as I'm aware there is no solution - I heard that Chessbase or to be more precise Fritz 8 works and this might be a good try but I already own Fritz 10 so ... for me it is better to go to win to play chess ... in fact the thing the bothers me most is that there is no software for linux that has a multitasking ability (when talking about chess) and I wasn't able to find a way to analyse my games using linux software ... the only way I know how to do that is to look move by move with an engine running ... but that takes too much time that I don't have ... there is no analysis option like there is in fritz ...

P.S. If there is any programmer or something like that that knows if something is being developed I would love to know about it (something like playchess I mean) or even in general (for chess) ...