Knights is the chess interface for KDE SC 4. It features play against opponents on the Free Internet Chess Server, a friend on the same computer, or a computer chess engine.
A game against GNU Chess with Knights' default appearance
Download
The latest stable version, along with packages for most popular Linux distributions, can be downloaded from KDE-Apps.
Knights with the East-West theme in the Unity environment
Features
The current stable version features:
- Local play between two players on the same computer
- Play against any computer program that supports the XBoard protocol
- Play on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS)
- Wathing two computer engines play against each other
- Legal move checking
- Markers for possible moves, opponent’s last move and sources of check
- Board borders and site notations
- Complete time control, with Plasma-styled clocks
- Several themes, with the possibility of downloading new ones from within the program
- Animated moves (configurable)
- Convenience views for playing on a chess server, including a seek graph, and text console, and a chat widget.
- Option to undo and redo moves
- Graphic interface for making and receiving offers from remote players
- Complete user documentation
- Use of Jovie, the KDE text-to-speak program, to speak opponent’s moves.
- Ability to control the program via a D-Bus interface. Currently nothing uses this interface yet, but it will be used for voice control with the help of Simon.
Support for offers and messages
Roadmap
The next release will most likely include:
- Support for saving and loading PGN files
- Support for the UCI protocol (used by Stockfish, Chessbase, and many others)
The Noughmad's Land 
Posted by Knights 2.4 Released « The Noughmad's Land on 21. October 2011 at 10:21
[…] Knights […]
Posted by Blue Mint (@TheBlueMint) on 21. October 2011 at 13:36
Very cool! I will be setting this up & trying this out on Kubuntu. The abilities to watch computers play and the integration of Jovie seem like thoughtful and full-featured additions.
Posted by Knights 2.4.1 Released « The Noughmad's Land on 17. January 2012 at 22:34
[…] Knights […]
Posted by Zabava ob izidu KDE 4.8 « The Noughmad's Land on 22. January 2012 at 10:54
[…] Knights […]
Posted by Jacmortier on 26. July 2012 at 00:57
There’s a problem with the configuration. When installing another chess engine like crafty, I cannot configure the bookpath, neither the number of cpu I would like to use.
For example, if I use crafty in command line, I can execute:
crafty bookpath=”/usr/share/crafty” mt=4 hash=1024m cache=128m
in order to play with crafty with 4 CPU and the opening book (for me it’s better using opening book rather than using crafty without it. He can learn from moving and write them into the book).
Is any chance of hope to examine the source code in order to modify the crafty opening book?