salimma's Journal: Anticipating a late night

I predict I'll be sleeping quite late tonight, for two reasons:

• The Democratic Super Primaries are on, my time zone is 12 hours ahead of EST, and the cable guy just tuned the family satellite receiver so I could watch C-SPAN :)

  Snicker away, but with my Internet connection being as it is, only a Zen monk could watch the Real stream.

• Dad's new PC has finally been troubleshot - a backhanded compliment to Asus for switching to AMI for its BIOS, and AMI for making such a flaky BIOS; the 'Legacy USB' feature that allows one to emulate PS/2 keyboard/mouse when using USB ones caused Memtest86+ and Linux to freeze.

It's a good thing I used Memtest; it froze consistently (double beep after 6 seconds with clock frozen for 1 second, another double beep at 9 seconds, one after 20 seconds or so, and a longer freeze at 3:20; if it does not stop here it'd stop at 5 minutes or so), pointing the finger at some mobo+BIOS+RAM combination, but while I thought of underclocking the CPU, RAM, and finally replacing CPU, RAM and motherboard, the idea that a mere USB mouse was behind this eluded my mind - and the guy at the hardware shop.

With that sorted, it's now time for various upgrades and burn testing - I'll probably just use Folding@Home though.

And that just reminded me of something. If anyone could recommend a chess program that runs under *n*x/BSD and supports openings, do let me know. Thought I might learn chess properly after years of amateurish stumblings. Thanks.

Chess

[elmegil]

I thought the standard was gnuchess [gnu.org]. It even has an X frontend, somewhere. I gave up playing against computers long time ago; they just beat me and make me feel stupid--I never seem to learn anything by playing them.

Re:Chess

[salimma]

xboard is the standard frontend, but there are many others. After searching high and low for a chess trainer, I found Knights [sourceforge.net], a chess interface for KDE. Quite interesting, but I miss Chessmaster's easily-customized difficulty settings. You could assign different values to each chess piece, or tell the computer to emulate a well-known grandmaster's style.

And not to mention, an opening trainer. Pick an opening and start playing it. Could be done with Knights and a game database, hopefully; I'll give it a tr