Linux and chess training

Computers can be very useful for both studying and playing chess. This is reflected in the large number of chess programs that are available. Most commercial programs, however, are written for a certain operating system from Redmond. Here, I will provide a brief introduction free chess software available for Linux. This is by no means meant to be a complete list of free chess programs for Linux but just a few personal suggestions.

The probably most popular chess programs are for playing chess against the computer, the so-called chess engines. A good chess program and the computing power of even a several years old PC is enough to beat the vast majority of amateur chess players. My personal favorite is therefore phalanx, which can be easily configured to play weaker using the "easy" settings.

Like many other chess engines, phalanx does not provide a graphical user interface. If you do not want to enter moves with your keyboard and visualize the position in your mind, you need an interface program. One common choice here is xboard. It not only lets you play against phalanx, but also provides an interface to play on internet chess servers such as FICS or ICC. People playing on FICS may want to take a look at eboard, which provides more features than xboard but works with FICS only.

Finally, if you are seriously into chess, you may want to save your games in a chess database to analyze your mistakes and to learn from games played by others. Scid is such a database program. It doesn't seem to be actively maintained any more, though. In addition to build your personal game collection, it provides numerous features to analyze games and to study openings.