Installing Xboard and interfacing with Sunfish

There are a number of good chess graphical user interfaces for Linux, we’re using Xboard as it’s fairly ubiquitous amongst common distro repos, but be sure to check out PyChess as well. Installation will just be a matter of:

Now fire up Xboard and select Engine >Load New 1st Engine. Enter in the Nickname field, for the Engine Directory use

(replacing with your username – Xboard doesn’t seem to understand the shorthand) and for the Engine Command use

. Leave all the other settings as they are and select ‘OK’.

The default XBoard setup gives the human player white pieces and if all has gone well the window title should now read ‘Sunfish’. Now you have your formidable opponent.

If you click one of your chess pieces then Xboard generously shows you where the piece can move to, which is not just useful for players who are starting out.

GNUChess will be equally as trivial to install, and Xboard already includes an Engine List entry for it. You can load GNUChess as the second engine, and then select Two Machines from the Mode menu. Battle ought immediately to commence, with GNUChess even showing you some of its crazy thought process in the status bar.