XBoard
XBoard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major
forms, including international chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess),
shogi (Japanese chess) and Makruk, in addition to many minor variants such as
Losers Chess, Crazyhouse, Chess960 and Capablanca Chess. It displays a
chessboard on the screen, accepts moves made with the mouse, and loads
and saves games in Portable Game Notation (PGN). It serves as a
front-end for many different chess services, including:
-
Chess engines that will run on your machine and play a game against
you or help you analyze, such as GNU Chess, Crafty, or many
others.
- Chess servers on the Internet, where you can connect to play chess
with people from all over the world, watch other users play, or just
hang out and chat.
- Correspondence chess played by electronic mail. The CMail program
automates the tasks of parsing email from your opponent, playing his
moves out on your board, and mailing your reply move after you've
chosen it.
XBoard runs on Unix and Unix-like systems that use the X Window
System.
XBoard GTK build, playing some Chess variant
WinBoard, configured with marble board
More...
WinBoard
The project also includes a port to Microsoft Windows systems called
WinBoard.
You can find the downloads for binaries and preconfigured installer packages of WinBoard at
HGM's download page
.
Also see
HGM's web page
.
Development for WinBoard, reporting bugs and any other requests can
be done at the same places as for XBoard (see below).
Downloading XBoard
Stable version (4.9.0)
Sources of the current stable version are available from the main GNU
download server
(
HTTPS
,
HTTP
,
FTP
) and its
mirrors
; please
use a mirror
if possible.
Precompiled versions are available
for
openSUSE
and
Debian
(if you know of other distribution that package it, please let us
know).
Mac OS X Intel 10.6+ App
Development version
For information about development, please see
the
XBoard project
page
at
savannah.gnu.org
.
We regularly do so-called "developer releases", which include
the newest and the latest we are working on.
If you want to
help us
test, or just want to use the
new features, you might prefer to use those over the stable version.
At the
Open Build Server
we provide packages that can be installed in parallel
to the normal xboard version. To do this the programs are renamed to
xboardnext (latest from the v4.9.x branch in Git) and xboardgit (latest
version from the master branch in Git). Packages are available for:
Debian 6.0, Fedora 17/18, RedHat RHEL 6,
openSUSE 12.1/12.2/12.3/Tumbleweed/Factory, CentOS 6, Arch,
Ubuntu 10.04/12.04/12.10. These packages are generated automatically
and are for testing purposes only. Please let us know if you have any
problems related to XBoard or package dependencies.
Windows builds of development versions can often be found at
HGM's web page
.
Furthermore we provide development versions (tagged commits in Git):
- a snapshot of the master branch:
master-20140119
;
- no developer release at the moment.
How to build the development version
- Git version
-
The
Git
repository
is on Savannah. All branches can be viewed on its web
interface, which also provides tarballs of all tagged versions. These
tarballs are different from the ones that you can download from the
GNU server
, and you will
need to run
./autogen.sh
on them as described below.
If you want to get a copy of the repository, you can clone it using the following command:
git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/xboard.git
For more information on how to use Git, please visit the
Git home page
.
After cloning the Git repository or downloading and unpacking a snapshot
tarball from the Git repository,
run
./autogen.sh
,
./configure
, and then
make
and
make install
.
- Tarballs from the download server
-
Unpack the tarball and do
./configure
followed by
make
and
make install
.
Archive
You can also find an archive of old versions on
the FTP server
.
Documentation
The official
manual page for XBoard
is available online,
as is
documentation for most GNU software
.
This discusses every feature XBoard has in detail.
You may also find this information on your local system by
running
info xboard
or
man xboard
, or by
looking at
/usr/doc/xboard/
,
/usr/local/doc/xboard/
, or similar directories on your system.
There now also exists an
XBoard User
Guide
, which only presents the main features in a more pedestrian way.
This would be an excellent starting point if you are a novice XBoard user.
If you have prior experience with XBoard, but just want to know what new
features have been added since the version you were used to,
the pages in the
What's New
section would
be the place to go.
A description of the
Chess Engine Communication
Protocol
used by XBoard to communicate with Chess Engines is also available.
Screenshots
These are screenshots taken from version 4.4.0 (click to enlarge).
Help needed
It would be great if people would like to help in the developing process
We can use all kinds of help, from people who just use the software and have
a feature request (send them to developer mailing list), to people who can
update/check the documentation and especially people who test development
versions (send problems to the developer mailing list).
Have a look at the following list in case you are interested:
Admin
A new project admin is needed. The person would manage the Savannah
pages, membership to Savannah/Git access, do releases, and manage the email
list, etc. The job could also be split among several people.
Translators
We added support for different languages to XBoard and need people to
translate it. The translation is handled by
the translation
project
. You can check on the
current status
and how to
join the translation project
.
Testers
We are always looking for people who are willing to test the latest new
features and give us feedback or new ideas. If you are interested, please
send an email to our list at <
xboard-devel@gnu.org
> or just try
out the program and reports bugs either to the email list or to the bug
tracker (see
below
for links).
GTK developer needed
We are also working on merging WinBoard and XBoard back into one version
using a cross platform GTK-front end. This will help us clean up the code
and make things like internationalization easier. We made some progress, if
you know want to help out there are still lots of things waiting to be done.
Email the
mailing list
for more
information. There is already some unmerged code to port to GTK3.
Update the help files
The help files for Xboard and WinBoard could be merged into one document.
Update the webpage
The content of the webpage could be updated with screenshots from
the latest version. We also have a new tutorial that could be
integrated.
Links
- XBoard/WinBoard
- Incomplete list of computer engines that work with XBoard
- Chess server you can connect to using XBoard
- Other interfaces
Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)
If you have any questions, please check out our
FAQ
.
Mailing Lists
XBoard has two mailing lists:
Announcements about XBoard and most other GNU software are made on
<
info-gnu@gnu.org
>.
To subscribe to these or any GNU mailing lists, please send an empty
mail with a
Subject:
header of just "subscribe" to the
relevant
-request
list. For example, to subscribe yourself to the
GNU announcement list, you would send mail to <
info-gnu-request@gnu.org
>.
Or you can use the
mailing list web
interface
.
Reporting Bugs and Requesting New Features
If you think you found a bug, please check the
bugtracker
for open
and already closed bugs. If you found a new bug, please, file a bug report
either via our bug-related email list or in the bugtracker.
For feature requests, please use our mailinglist: <
xboard-devel@gnu.org
>.
Please remember that development of XBoard, and GNU in general, is a
volunteer effort; you too can contribute. For information, please
read
How to help GNU
.
Licensing
XBoard
is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the
GNU General Public License
as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.