Microsoft's Windows has probably the best commercial chess softwares (eg. Fritz, Chessmaster). However, we can find some very interesting chess programs for Unix/Solaris in the free world! Today, I'd like to present two of them that I'm using on my laptop running SXDE 01/08.
Jin
The first one is Jin. Jin is a Java client for various chess servers. It currently supports the Internet Chess Club (chessclub.com) and the Free Internet Chess Server (freechess.org) but is designed to be able to support any chess server. You can download Jin from Soundforge.
First, you need to login to your favorite chess server (mine is FICS). If you don't already have an account, you can create it from the Jin's login interface.
Then you can either seek an opponent by specifying what kind of game you want to play...
Or just select your opponent from the Sought window
Here is an example of the chessboard window (totally configurable)
Scid
The second one is Scid ("Shane's Chess Information Database"), a chess database application for Windows and Linux operating systems.
Scid is not a chess client per say, I mean you won't be able to play chess with it. With Scid you can maintain a database of chess games, search games by
many criteria, view graphical trends, and produce printable reports on
players and openings.
There are many more features as well; the screenshots show just some of what Scid
can do. So, Scid is the perfect tool on Solaris to improve your chess game.
Scid is available here
Renaud, drop me a line at nhernandezsr@hotmail.com. Your interest in computer chess and apparent expertise in servers is very interesting. We may have something to talk about. I have probably the biggest opening book in the world and am very hungry for computing resources for a low-profile project.
Posted by Nelson Hernandez on February 28, 2008 at 10:59 PM CET #