Olavi Halme wrote: I suspect that the sets of people who know about and are interested in these games, and those who package for Fedora, have not yet overlapped. If you can provide me URLs, I will take a look and possibly package them. Thanks, J -- in your fear, seek only peace in your fear, seek only love -d. bowie

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 09:35:56 +0200, Olavi Halme <omhalme64(a)kolumbus.fi&gt; wrote: 'chess' is completely broken after F14. Upstream is dead and it needs to be updated for more recent cegui and ogre. I still hope to do that, but I haven't had time to work on it for quite a while. 'pychess' was recently orphaned, but might get picked up again. 'knights' is a fairly recent addition. There could be other ones I am not aware of. I don't play much chess, so I don't have recommendations for how any of these fare against each other. Be aware that Fedora only includes 'free' (freedom) software. Programs that are commercial or free for noncommercial use, are not 'free' even if there is no charge for them and will not be included in Fedora.

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Olavi Halme <omhalme64(a)kolumbus.fi&gt; wrote: For those who don't know, since chess is such a well defined and universal game, basically all computer chess programs are divided into seperate UI and engine processes, communicating with a standard protocol. In fact, most engine developers don't bother writing GUIs at all, and vice versa, so you have to mix and match. There are two protocols in use, "Xboard/Winboard/Chess Engine Communication Protocol", which is basically just GNU Chess's text interface, which has been around a long time and is widely supported in the open source world, but is a bit hacky having not been designed to be a universal standard in the first place. Then there's UCI, a newer better protocol, which does not yet seem to be widely supported in the open source world. We don't seem to have anything supporting it in Fedora yet, however a Xboard/UCI adapter exists: http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/PolyGlot.html Stockfish is generally considered the strongest open source engine right now, and is a UCI engine, and Scid is an open source "chess database" that apparently also acts as an Xboard/UCI GUI. Getting Scid into the distribution is probably a good start. I'm completely terrible at chess, I'm lucky if I can beat GNU chess on gnome chess's easy setting (only look two moves ahead) so I have not had a burning desire to get any strong engines into the distribution... :)