any chess programs?
 

Would there be any chess programs, regardless of quality, included among the games in any distro? I haven't paid attention to games in Linux--that's not why I installed it--but if chess was available, I'd want whatever distro had it.

I just use Arasan with the Xboard frontend. Arasan is distro-agnostic and Xboard is fairly standard IIRC (if not ancient) and has minimal dependencies.

If you are running KDE, Knights is a good front end. I believe the version I have uses the Crafty chess program. It comes by default with openSUSE and probably others.

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gnuchess?

Okay, Cogar, I installed the Crafty engine you mentioned; and I could have tried Knights, but I installed a front-end called Eboard because it was one of the first I saw in Synaptic's list. Where can I expect to find them in the start menu? I thought Linux would automatically put them in Games, but they aren't there. (Sorry, this may be the first time I've installed a program that I needed to find right away.)

If you are running KDE, use Alt-F2 to launch the Linux version of the run command. Type in Eboard and press enter. Another way of doing the same thing is to open a console window and enter Eboard. The difference is that this leaves a console window open while you play (if that matters).

Installing a package does not necessarily add an application to the menu system. This is especially true of packages that are not part of a distributions "standard" repository.

knights has a nice frontend.
My favorite is a Windows program known as Kchess and you can run it with Wine. It even indicates what moves a piece can make.

Thanks, Cogar. Eboard is now working. To you and everyone else who suggested the Knights frontend: I think I will later uninstall Eboard and try Knights, because Eboard is relatively crude. The pieces are ugly; its controls for common game functions aren't simple--I used to have Chessmaster, and am used to Ctrl-N for a new game; and...well, I was going to say it takes too long to think, but I suppose that is the engine's fault.