The Packman packagers have now picked up packaging Chess Game applications (that user Akoellh packaged for a brief time) and one can find these applications on the Packman web site/repository, mostly packaged for openSUSE-11.x.
I also updated the openSUSE chess wiki accordingly: Games/Chess - openSUSE
I can’t understand why the default openSUSE installation doesn’t offer a simple chess game, even though the “board games” icon is a knight. I’m trying to resist the temptation to install a serious chess game as it tends to take over your life (well mine anyway) but it would be nice to have the odd casual fun with something like GNU Chess…
Tend to agree with gminnerup but I am afraid that my productivity might go down further! I deliberately didn’t install one now 
Its true that neither the liveCD nor the installation DVD contain GNUchess. However GNUchess is in the OSS repository, so given the OSS repository IS setup by default when one installs openSUSE-11.2, a simple:
zypper install gnuchess xboard
should install gnuchess and xboard (if not installed already).
The “problem” (with me) is since I always have the Packman repos enabled that it was too easy to install these chess apps on all my PCs. Now I have a tremendously addicting temptation to either “waste my time” playing too much chess, or waste my time setting two computer programs up against each other, and enjoy watching them play against each other.
On the scale of computer chess, gnuchess gets thrashed fairly badly by the other chess programs. And given how gnuchess (on my Intel core i7 920) can clobber my chess game, its a bit sobering to see gnuchess thrashed. 
I know it’s only a zypper away, just questioning the choice of distro defaults, especially with that tempting icon.
But I think I’ll leave it for now, got some serious work to finish first…
On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:06:02 GMT, syampillai <syampillai@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
>Tend to agree with gminnerup but I am afraid that my productivity might
>go down further! I deliberately didn’t install one now
That is one problem i (thank chance) no longer have. 30 years of essentially
no practice has left me so little game that a good 12 year old should be able
to beat me.