Studying Chess on Ubuntu Linux - Part 1 Setup

The first thing that you need to do is to setup your programs that are needed for studying. Generally players use a chess engine and a chess database program. Luckily for us someone created SCID an open source database program that works fairly well and is available on all platforms. I use Ubuntu Linux so my guide will be specific for Ubuntu but it should be easy to set this up on any system, including OS X, Windows and Linux.

Another benefit that Chess Players have received from open source is the chess engine Stockfish.

Stockfish is an open-source UCI chess engine based on Glaurung. Stockfish is an alpha-beta searcher and uses a bitboard representation.

Install SCID

1. sudo apt-get install build-essential - This installs a Linux C++ compiler so that SCID can be built.
2. sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev - This installs a runtime in Linux which enables the UI for SCID.
3. Download SCID and extract to a temp directory.
4. ./configure
5. ./make
6. ./make install

Install Stockfish

1. Download Stockfish
2. Download Stockfish Opening Book
3. Extract Stockfish and run make profile-build ARCH=x86-32 for 32 bit Linux systems. 64 bit Linux systems can use make profile-build ARCH=x86-64
4. Installation of this is a bit different than SCID.  I copied my executable (the file named stockfish) to ~/bin so I can have a place to save my opening book.
5. Extract opening book to ~/bin.

Setup Stockfish in SCID

1. Click on Tools and then Analysis Engine...in the menu
2. Create a new chess engine by clicking on the New... button.
3. Type in Stockfish in the name
4. The command field should contain the executable for Stockfish.  Mine was ~/bin/stockfish
5. Directory should be set to . to indicate that the directory to use should be the same as the directory that the executable is located in.
6. Click on Configure UCI Engine.
7. There are lots of options here - I mainly only change the book file to book.bin and set the Multiple variations to 4.

I will discuss how to use these programs next time I post about studying chess on Linux.

FICS (freechess.org) Interface Recommendation

In my previous post about Places to Play Chess Online, I recommended that everyone use Jin.  There are a lot of interfaces that work fairly well.  I review them in this post for each of the platforms I have used to connect to FICS.  See my Chess Links page for links to the various FICS interfaces.

OS X FICS Interfaces

• Jin - Highly recommended for OS X - great seek graph - cross platform
• Visir - No chat at all - makes it very hard to play in tournaments.
• Fixation - Newer - seems to have some basic features but does not work as well a Jin.

Linux FICS Interfaces

• Jin - Great seek graph - cross platform
• eboard - I like the board and console for this interface - works great and seems to be the best Linux interface
• Visir - No chat at all - makes it very hard to play in tournaments

Windows FICS Interfaces

• Jin - Great seek graph - cross platform
• Babaschess - Best windows interface - highly configurable - easy to use - probably the best interface to FICS.

Iphone FICS Interfaces

• Ichess Pack - Good seek table, connects to training with the online lectures, Endgame bot and PuzzleBot.

Places to play chess online

I am going to start going through the many places you can play online and give a review of them. If I don't have a membership I will try to use it as a free player.

The first place I will review is FICS (Free Internet Chess Server).

From their website (Freechess.org)I grabbed a real quick description

Play chess on the web for free.
The Free Internet Chess Server, with over 300000 registered users, is one of the oldest and one of the largest internet chess servers. Whether serious with your chess or just looking for the occasional game, whether looking for another player or eager to challenge a strong computer, whether you like a blitz chess or you are fond of one of the many variants, here you can play chess over the internet for free.

This is the best option I have found for free chess. There is good competition - almost always have a tournament running. They are stable and have been around a long time. If you have not logged into a Internet Chess Server before - you will need a client to connect. One of the best clients that exists to connect to FICS is called Jin Chess Client. This program runs on Linux, OS X and Windows. It connects you to the server - displays a graph of all the available games and provides a chessboard to make your moves on. There are many others as well but I have found this one to work best.

The Freechess.org staff have been around a long time and provide a great service to the chess community. Login and check them out.