Ubuntu Linux Bible by William von Hagen

Author:William von Hagen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Other Popular Games

The games packs installed as part of a default Ubuntu Desktop installation are really just the tip of the iceberg as far as games on Ubuntu Linux are concerned. The Ubuntu repositories each offer many other games that are a package manager session away. Trying to describe each of these games would bloat this book far beyond its purpose of helping you to get up and running with all aspects of Ubuntu Linux, so this section focuses on how to find equivalents or clones of some well-known games that many people would enjoy playing on their systems if they only knew what they were called and how to use them. For information on installing packages, see Chapter 19, “Adding, Removing, and Updating Software.” The remainder of this chapter focuses on explaining what to look for if you’re interested in a specific game or type of game.

Billions and Billions of Versions of Chess

In the world of open source computing, Chess has two things going for it: It’s incredibly popular, and nobody owns it. The fact that Chess and its ancestors have been popular for a few thousand years as a thought-provoking strategy game makes it no surprise that versions of computer Chess have existed since computers had enough memory to manage any sort of sophisticated game play. The fact that nobody owns the rights to the name Chess means that there are no royalty or licensing entanglements, so any computer Chess game can actually be called Chess without having to resort to camouflage names or slight changes to the rules to escape corporate greed.

A simple search for Chess against package names and descriptions in the Synaptic Package Manager shows 26 packages. These include local and network-enabled Chess games, Chess-playing engines that you can compete against, a Chess game that you can play inside Emacs, special fonts for typesetting Chess moves, and even boards that you can format using TeX and LaTeX (discussed in Chapter 13, “Creating and Publishing Documents”), and much, much more.

Tip

If you’re a true Chess fan, your competition is no longer limited to friends, family, and neighbors, thanks to the Internet. You can find several Chess servers on the Internet, through which you can play remote opponents from the convenience of your own workstation. For more information, see web sites like the Free Internet Chess Server site at www.freechess.org and Tim Mann’s great summary of worldwide Chess servers at www.tim-mann.org/ics.html. There are also a variety of Chess servers that require some sort of payment or subscription to use their services and play against their subscribers. ♦

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