ChessBase with Wine

[thierry]

Ok so my biggest problem in Linux and the only reason for me to keep a Windows system are my chess software. There are a few packages available in the Universe repository but Linux chess programs lack lots of the functions available in commercial products, and there's no really good looking GUI.

If you want to stick to open source and non commercial software I recommend Eboard (for playing) and Scid (for analysing). You can use these with Crafty, which is the strongest non commercial (but not free) chess engine available in Linux. You can download the .deb files here :

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games

You can have an openings book also. To install I renamed the files to crafty.deb and crafty-book.deb. Then I did sudo dpkg -i crafty.deb and sudo dpkg -i --force overwrite crafty-book.deb. The option in the second command is important because to install a large book you have to overwrite the small one that comes with the Crafty package.

Now the main reason for this post is that I successfully installed Fritz 6 in Ubuntu with Wine (20050310). There's nothing in the forum on this topic yet so this is just aiming at filling a gap.

Fritz 6 works in a fake Windows 98 environment and also by accessing the WinXP files. A small difference in performance : compared to Windows XP Pro its' faster by 3.7 % in Ubuntu !

Only one problem : I couldn't install the newer Junior 9 engine and the Fritz 8 interface. If someone succeeded in that I would really appreciate knowing how. Having to boot in Windows just for one program is kind of sad.

Cheers.

[thierry]

Just some additional information after more testing :

A few functions didn't work in Fritz 6 when I used it in a fake Windows environment : database functions and change engine the most important. You can do just everything if you access the Windows partition. You only need the CD in the drive to launch the program. This should be all about ChessBase.

Now if you want a non commercial good-looking GUI for playing chess in Ubuntu I really recommend this one :

http://www.playwitharena.com/

Arena is the best Windows-based chess GUI available for free, and it seems to behave very well with Wine. The only drawback is here the performance : it was faster by 16.6 % in Windows. But you can maybe find a better configuration than mine... I should mention also that I have the Microsoft fonts installed. I don't know how it looks without.

The big advantage with this interface is that you're not limited in your choice of engines, there's a whole bunch of chess playing engines you can download and use with it. The strongest being probably ProDeo, which is actually the former commercial Rebel chess program, made available to all after it's author retired from competition and commerce. It's much stronger than Crafty !

Have a look at this page also to download superb graphics for Arena :

http://members.chello.at/grafixbywilhelm/Index1.html

The Arena project has contributors from all over the world, and I find it very much in the Ubuntu spirit.

Now one more word for those who tried Crafty and got beaten in 15 moves. Check out the following :

http://www.ex.ac.uk/~dregis/DR/chess.html

This is the best chess course available on the web, you can download it all and use it offline in your favourite browser.

Enjoy !

[jodef]

Nice to find a chess lover like myself I also boot into windows for Fritz 8, as my internet server client I use jin the latest version it runs rather smoothly, as soon as I get some time I am going to try to get it running on Ubuntu.

Maybe any other chess enthusiasts in the forums could post here or maybe let's start a new thread maybe collaboratively we could get a working chess environment in Ubuntu.

[thierry]

I'm still hesitating about installing a KDE desktop just to check out Knights. I started with the idea of limiting myself to Gnome and Fluxbox, but it's really tempting... Any feedback ?

For now I'm very satisfied with Fritz 6. Arena is unfortunately not so responsive.

Knights started to accommodate UCI engines and looks very good in the description and screenshots. It's an ongoing project (as far as I know Eboard and Scid are not really developped anymore) and I think those guys definitely need support !

[gil-galad]

I can't speak for the chess engines, but eboard is actually a pretty good gui for playing chess. I don't see anything wrong with it.

[thierry]

The look and feel, and the functionality of Arena are just much better. And you can have Crafty play like Anand or Capablanca... Ok this is a gimmick, but more seriously what I'm talking about is a training tool for club players, with powerful opening book and database functions. It's nice to have coaching functions for kids too. All this is available for Windows, and I just hope it will be one day in our OS !

[mrbass]

OYou can use these with Crafty, which is the strongest non commercial (but not free) chess engine available in Linux. .

Rank:Program:                  New:  Comm.Priv.  old.
1    Shredder 7.04             2760    *         2766
2    Gandalf 6.0               2738    *         2582
3    The King 3.33             2733    *         2738
4    DeepSjeng 1.6a            2690    *         2697
5    List 512                  2687              New
6    Ruffian 2.1.0             2682    *         2689
7    Pro Deo 1.0               2672              2724
8    Aristarch 4.50            2666              2710
9    Crafty 19.13-64           2647              2611
10   Maestro 1.08uci           2624         **   2562
11   SmarThink 0.18a-r165      2616              2599
12   WARP 0.65                 2610         **   2631
13   Pharaon 3.1-64            2610              2559
14   Fruit X-12/11             2610              2551
15   Ktulu 6.1 beta 3          2596    *         2512
16   Tao 5.7b06                2578              2598
17   SlowChess Blitz WV        2578              2465
18   Yace 0.99.87              2576              2584
19   Thinker 4.7a              2575              2617
20   Delfi 4.5                 2569              2557

Personally I like Yace...anything in the top 50 is an extremely strong engine. Here's my chess links
http://www.chessopolis.com/cchess.htm
http://www.tim-mann.org/engines.html
http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/ (see rankings section)

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1048

Hmm maybe will have to try List 513 or List 512

Program                          Elo    +   -   Games   Score   Av.Op.  Draws

 

  1 Shredder 8                     : 2797   10  11  3048    63.2 %   2703   30.9 %
  2 Shredder 7.04                  : 2772    9  10  3957    61.9 %   2687   30.3 %
  3 X3D Fritz                      : 2770   24  23   640    59.0 %   2707   29.2 %

     

  4 Junior 9.0.0.2                 : 2767   36  33   300    56.8 %   2719   27.7 %
  5 Deep Fritz 7                   : 2766   13  14  1800    61.3 %   2686   29.7 %
  6 Fritz 8 Bilbao                 : 2763   31  25   440    53.2 %   2741   30.9 %
  7 Fritz 8.0.0.23  3-03           : 2760    7   8  6015    60.4 %   2686   28.5 %
  8 Hiarcs 9                       : 2753   11  11  2690    59.3 %   2688   33.3 %
  9 Fritz 7                        : 2752    9  13  3285    67.7 %   2623   25.0 %

 

 11 Deep Fritz 8                   : 2749   15  15  1510    60.9 %   2672   29.7 %
 12 Shredder 7                     : 2739   14  16  1550    62.9 %   2647   27.8 %
 13 Hiarcs8 Bareev                 : 2737   32  29   370    57.0 %   2688   30.3 %
 14 Junior 9 AMD                   : 2734   25  26   560    60.3 %   2661   27.3 %
 15 Gandalf 6.0                    : 2733   44  58   140    48.2 %   2746   30.7 %
 16 Junior 8                       : 2733    9   8  5129    56.9 %   2684   27.0 %
 17 Chess Tiger 15.0               : 2729    9   7  5289    56.0 %   2687   35.3 %
 18 Fritz for Fun 3                : 2717   43  35   240    52.9 %   2697   27.5 %
 19 Shredder Classic               : 2717   18  20  1000    62.5 %   2628   28.1 %
 20 Chess Tiger 14.0               : 2716    9  10  3683    61.1 %   2638   32.3 %
 -

 21 Junior 9.0.0                   : 2716   35  44   220    45.7 %   2746   33.2 %
 22 List 513                       : 2714   18  16  1200    55.0 %   2679   29.9 %
 23 The King 3.23 sel=12           : 2711   11   9  3741    53.6 %   2685   30.6 %
 24 Deep Junior 8.ZX               : 2711   46  58   140    48.9 %   2718   26.4 %
 25 The King 3.33                  : 2709   15  14  1560    57.3 %   2658   29.6 %
 26 Deep Fritz                     : 2705   27  25   530    56.4 %   2660   27.5 %
 27 List 512                       : 2701   11  10  3176    58.7 %   2641   30.4 %
 28 Fritz 6                        : 2700   26  43   370    71.1 %   2544   20.5 %
 29 Hiarcs 8                       : 2698    8   7  6489    54.4 %   2667   32.2 %
 30 Ruffian 2.0 - 2.1.0            : 2693   12  10  3013    53.2 %   2671   31.2 %

[jodef]

I'm still hesitating about installing a KDE desktop just to check out Knights. I started with the idea of limiting myself to Gnome and Fluxbox, but it's really tempting... Any feedback ?

For now I'm very satisfied with Fritz 6. Arena is unfortunately not so responsive.

Knights started to accommodate UCI engines and looks very good in the description and screenshots. It's an ongoing project (as far as I know Eboard and Scid are not really developped anymore) and I think those guys definitely need support !

Knights is still a much underdeveloped interface : looks pretty but not that much functionality past that you would be just as well if not better just using xboard. The project looks promising but that's much farther ahead in the future.

[hober]

Really nice to see chess fans here using linux! I have used only linux for chess already for last 3-4 years, thought so far that im only one or maybe one of the very few...

About topic i can say only so much that have installed chessbase light with wine. Works ok and i have converted some data in chessbase format to pgn. Unfortunately i dont have any windows commercial chess packages so cant check out. I dont feel any need to buy neither.

Chess programs i usually use are Crafty + Xboard + Scid. This combination does in fact everything i need, although it requires some skills to properly set up and configure. Especially xboard which is powerful interface although not easy to configure. Crafty is strong engine with nice features, for example it can annotate your set of games and produce output to html or pgn. There are also more strong engines like yace. But strongest engine for linux might be new engine called Fruit. I have written for myself xboard tournament manager in java, and in my computer in my tournaments Fruit seems to be most successfull engine. Fruit is UCI engine, one can use it in scid or in xboard via polyglot adapter or directly in jose interface. Jose is nice interface written in java, contains nice 3D chess peaces btw. On more good java interface is jin, this one is for internet chess servers.

I want to say that i dont miss any windows chess program, be it commecial or not.

[kb00heda]

I use Crafty and YACE for analysis in SCID, together with eboard for online chess (FICS, ICC). For now I am using Crafty 19.19 compiled from source (quite easy to set up). It can be fetched from

ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/

under "source" (there is also some tablebases and opening books if one is interested). YACE is easy to download from the authors homepage at

http://home1.stofanet.dk/moq/

The latest version would be Paderborn (though I believe a newer one to exist). Again the source was easy to compile.

I own a couple of Chessbase CD:s from my days of Windows, but have yet to get them going properly under WINE. Perhaps that is an ATI issue? (Everything seems to be...!) The worst thing is the non-ability to read Chessbase format, since my opening CD:s becomes useless. I have not found any such reader in Linux.

As for the chess engines, it would be nice to get Shredder up and running, which I think is an UCI? But even if it was possible, I do not know how to. If someone could provide some leads, I would be grateful. Fruit was an UCI too?

BTW, Lokasoft sells chess engines as well, and it seems like Ruffian and Deep SJeng offers Linux support with xboard. Have anyone tried them out?

/David