What is XBoard?
===============

XBoard is a graphical chessboard for the X Window System.  It can
serve as a user interface for chess engines such as Crafty, Fairy-Max,
GNU Chess, and Stockfish, for the Free Internet Chess Server, or for
electronic mail correspondence chess. It supports all major forms of
chess, such as international chess, xiangqi and shogi. XBoard can also
be used by itself as viewer for stored chess games.  See the manual
page for further details.

XBoard is free software, copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation
and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  See the file
COPYING for details.

You can build xboard on most systems with the following commands:

    test -f ./configure || autoreconf --install
    ./configure
    make

See the file INSTALL for more detailed guidance.

See the file FAQ.html for answers to frequently asked questions.


What is WinBoard?
=================

WinBoard is a port of XBoard to run natively on Windows.  It is part
of the XBoard project and is released under the same terms as XBoard.

You can build WinBoard using the free Cygwin toolchain from
www.cygnus.com with the following commands.

    cd winboard
    make -f makefile.gcc

You can build WinBoard using Microsoft Visual C with the following
commands, or by opening the project in Visual Studio and clicking the
build button.

    cd winboard
    nmake -f makefile.ms


Reporting problems
==================

Report bugs and problems with XBoard and WinBoard to
bug-xboard@gnu.org.  With XBoard, please use the "script" program to
start a typescript, run XBoard with the -debug command line option,
and include the typescript output in your message.  With WinBoard,
please use the /debug command line option and include the contents of
the file WinBoard.debug.  Also tell us what kind of machine and what
operating system version you are using.  On Unix, the command "uname
-a" will tell you this.  On Windows, right-click on My Computer and
select Properties.

Here is a sample of approximately what you should type (on GNU/Linux):

    script
    uname -a
    test -f ./configure || autoreconf --install
    ./configure
    make
    ./xboard -debug
    exit
    mail bug-xboard@gnu.org
    Subject: Your short description of the problem
    Your detailed description of the problem
    ~r typescript
    .

If you would like to improve XBoard, please contact us at
xboard-devel@gnu.org.
