Chess for linux – Jin review and Download

When you switch from Windows to Linux, you will miss some “commercial” software. To be completely honest most of them does not have a Linux version, but do not despair!

All software you run on Windows can eventually be run under Linux.

Unfortunately most of it as a big learning curve to be able to run correctly, and Chess for linux is no exception.
But despite that you can find good and free alternatives to get Chess for linux.

Today Iam going to guide you on how to obtain a chess client to play online on the FICS (Free Internet Chess Server)
There are a lot of different “clients” to play on FICS as you can see on their webpage LINK.

I choose Jin because it is really easy to set up, as a small learning curve, you just need to configure it once, create a link and that’s it you can forget it is even there. This will be the easiest solution to get online Chess running on linux.

So lets start the tutorial to get Jin working with FICS

Jin Download and set-up tutorial

The first step is for you to create a FICS account.

You can do that by browsing to FICS webpage here LINK

Fill the form with First name, user name, email, etc (Be sure to use a real email because you need to click the activation link they are going to send)

Check your email, click the activation link.

Now you have a FICS account, but you still need the software to play chess online on your Linux distro.

Second step Download Jin.

To always get the latest version, you should proceed to the download through the official Jin website on this LINK

Click on Download Jin, it will start the download of a tar.gz file which works exactly as a ZIP file on Windows.

– After you download the file, open the folder that contains it. Right click and choose “extract here”

– Open the folder just created jin-2.14.1 or the version you got.

Double-click jin

Select the first option “Run in Terminal”

Choose the server (In this case the second one Free Internet Chess Server)

Login with your username and password.

And thats it Welcome to Jin and FICS :)

This are the most basic steps to get Jin up and running on your linux OS.

But there are some other important tweaks you should do to personalize your experience and make it easier to use:

Create a Link to Jin on your Desktop

First of all, you do not want to navigate to Jin folder every-time you want to play it right?

Just like in other OS whe need to create a link to Jin application and drag it to your desktop.

To create a link using Linux the easiest way is just to grab the program with your mouse, drag it to where you wish while pressing Ctrl+Shift on your keyboard this will create a link to the file instead of creating a copy of the file.

Change the link Icon

When you create the link, the Icon it will show, will be the regular Shell command Icon. To change it to “Jin” Icon:

Right click the link on your desktop > select properties > click the icon on the properties page > browse to your Jin folder and click the Icon.

Personalize Jin behavior and feel

To change options like pre move and automatic promotion you need to open Jin.

Log in. Click on Preferences > Chess board… > Moves – And here you can select the Auto promotion option and the Moving in Advance select the (premove)

Feel free to mess around with the remaining menus and set everything to your own taste.

If you liked the text and want to see other articles I made (Not about chess) please do visit my webpage at www.securityfreak.info

Some topics I talk in there are Deep Web, Tor, Online Security, etc

Thanks for reading