Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

fics is the free internet chess server. Xboard is a chess client. This is how you make them work together:

I usually use xboard. It's possible to, e.g., log on to servers like ICC and FICS, which I find to be good places to play chess at.

Just run

ICC: "xboard -ics -icshost chessclub.com"
FICS: "xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org"

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-20184.html