14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind GNOME Chess, a user-friendly interface for various chess engines available under Linux-based operating systems, has announced on February 16, 2014, the immediate availability for testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Chess 3.12 application.
This is an important release, because it switches to the UCI (Universal Chess Interface) protocol in order to communicate with the GNU Chess software, which is now the recommended default chess engine for all Linux operating systems.
However, users are urged to use GNU Chess 6.1 or later, as previous versions will not work with this release of GNOME Chess. So if you don't upgrade your Linux distribution's GNU Chess packages to at least version 6.1.0, you won’t be able to run GNOME Chess 3.12.
GNOME Chess 3.12 Beta 1 also introduces new difficulty levels for GNU Chess, moves the configuration files of the engines from SYSCONFDIR/chess-engines.conf to SYSCONFDIR/gnome-chess/engines.conf, and moves some actions from the gear menu to the header bar.
Furthermore, this first Beta of the upcoming GNOME Chess 3.12 application doesn’t provide 3D support for the new Wayland and Mir display servers, and users are urged to use the 2D mode instead. Unfortunately, the 3D mode will no longer be ready for the final release of GNOME Chess 3.12, but it will probably be added in the next point releases.
This version also makes the game less overwhelming by adding two extra seconds of delay before the engine makes a move, fixes some kind of color issue with the window subtitle displayed when White is checkmated, and updates the manual page as well as various translations.
You can test this development version of GNOME Chess in the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.12 Beta 1 desktop environment, or you can download the GNOME Chess 3.12 Beta 1 sources right now from Softpedia.