How can I play chess using either eboard or xboard?
 

I've tried starting them both, xboard won't even start. I googled e and xboard slackware and only got links to the mirrors in the first couple of pages, I skimmed through the man pages, but I couldn't figure out how to get either of them working. All I could do is start a game in eboard using play vs the computer - play vs generic program, but then the computer doesn't move. How should I invoke the game to get it working?

Sorry if the question is stupid, folks. Similar threads didn't help much either.

I use eboard to play chess in FICS (free internet chess server)
you must make an account in www.freechess.org (FICS) and used the id and pass from here to use in eboard
indicate is to install the timeseal for eboard
for xboard,to play against a chess engine,you need an chess engine like crafty,toga2,stockfish etc
for UCI chess engines(like toga2,stockfish) you need an program named polyglot
easy is to install crafty and play with xboard and start like this:
xboard -fcp crafty

eboard: Open the Peer menu/Play against engine/Generic engine/click ok. The computer will use the gnuchess5 engine that is already installed.

xboard: install the fairymax package from the salix repositories.

or from terminal:
xboard -fcp gnuchess

The desktop menu for KDE/XFCE and others was patched to run "xboard -fcp gnuchess" so starting it from the menu will work without having to install additional software.

Eric

i use XFCE and when i start xboard from menu then i have an error:failed to start first chessprogram fairymax on localhost

Yes, that is the default behaviour. It was patched for Slackware 13.37 ... are you running Slackware 13.1?
You can fix that by editing the file "/usr/share/applications/xboard.desktop", then change the line
to

Eric

thanks AlienBoB
yes ,I use Slackware 13.1
working now

Thank you folks for helping me with that. I use Fluxbox with a custom menu so I had to add the - fcp gnuchess by myself. I'll have a look at the recommended engines too. Registering in FICS as we speak. Solved.

Let me recommend shredderchess too. I bought the Linux version and I'm very pleased with it. There's a demo version if you want to try it.