Playchess and wine/crossover

Maybe the most popular way to play chess over the internet is through the Chessbase software playchess. Unfortunately for us Linux users Chessbase only provides software for Windows. There's a way around that though, Wine is a free software project for making a Windows application environment in Linux. Codeweavers, a small company, has made a commercial version of Wine, called Crossover. With Crossover it's easier to install and run programs.

Currently, Codeweavers has released a beta version of their latest Crossover, called Crossover Linux 6.0 beta 2. It's free for 60 days. Install it by executing the file and follow the instructions. When installing playchess, the Firefox download window asked if I wanted to use the already installed Crossover beta to open the file, so that was also easy to do.

Most of the features in playchess are working fine, like watching games, playing games and the nice World globe. I couldn't get the popular radio transmissions to work though, as they would crash playchess. Maybe it will work with the final version of Crossover, but don't bet on it.

Interesting also is to play with a computer engine on playchess. You can't do that without buying the Fritz chessprogram, as far as I know. The newest Fritz is number 9, with number 10 a few months away, but you can get Fritz 8 inexpensively at ebay.de. Currently there are auctions where Fritz 8 sells for 3.49 Euro + shipping. Does Fritz 8 work in Linux ? Maybe, it would be exciting to try it out.

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