Is there any chess board editor for Ubuntu to create a chess position (drag & drop, add pieces & etc.) and then be able to save/export it? I would like for it to be open source because I'm going to use it on an armel chroot.
My goal is to be able to save a position from physical chessboard.
I think you should try xboard or pychess!
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.
(quoted from http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/)
You can install it via terminal
sudo apt-get install xboard
or via Ubuntu software center (search for "xboard")
PyChess is a gtk chess client, originally developed for gnome, but running well under all other linux desktops. (Which we know of, at least). PyChess is 100% python code, from the top of the UI to the bottom of the chess engine, and all code is licensed under the Gnu Public License.
The goal of PyChess is to provide an advanced chess client for linux following the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines. The client should be usable to those new to chess, who just want to play a short game and get back to their work, as well as those who wants to use the computer to further enhance their play.
Features:
- Reads and writes PGN, EPD and FEN chess file formats; using the open dialog you can preview and open any position of any game contained in a PGN file and choose the player to play either side
(quoted from http://pychess.org/about/)
You can install it via terminal
sudo apt-get install pychess
or via Ubuntu software center (search for "pychess")
(I'm no chess expert but I googled it a bit. eboard could work too.)
Do you know stockfish together with Arena 3.0 ? Yes, - it is both freeware ! And quite good.
You can download both here :
You can take both Linux-Version and Windows-Version of stockfish 3.0 - then you start Arena with wine. You need only to copy/move the stockfish-programs-folder to the "engine"-folder of Arena and place it there alongside the others like Rybka and Hermann. Stockfish is very strong. It even was worldwide on 2nd place as Computer-Chess-Program and plays as good as IBM Deep Thought - with only about 20 to 30 ELO - points behind the first-rated place of Houdini.
Arena 3.0 has built-in editor and administration of many possibilities in case you managing with tournament-books and else.
Things have improved now. It is better to use web browser features to make the best chess board editor. The best feature currently is the Analysis board that you get with the Lichess.org website.
