I am sure any chess enthusiast has at least played on playchess.com, FIC, ICC, Chess.com, lichess, ArenaChess or some form of online chess.
My challenge as it has been for years now is to install one of these chess servers on my own server. It is still not accomplished. The easiest or so I thought was installing Capablanca, an open source chess server which evolved from Lasker-2.2.3. Lasker is significant because it is used by ICC, although heavily modified.
ICC is not free, charging a fee for playing members. However, since the entire server sourcecode is open source, this did not stop FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) from making a similiar server offering free membership to it's chess playing service. Although the installation is documented it is not an easy task to install and as can be seen by the lack of other ICC clones (except for FICS), I assume others have found it hard too.
Then came lichess. It has a higher degree of sophistication and more features compared to ICC. I was surprised that this server was also open source. So my attention is now shifted to getting an installed version of lichess server to work. I have not really attempted to install it yet but from what I read in the forums and also the lack of other lichess clones out there I assume it is not easy either.
Imagine a locally installed chess server in Malaysia! Ping rate will be faster so lag issues are less. That is heaven for online chess enthusiast. That also opens a whole host of possibilities like having our own (official or unnoficial) national online rating!
As it is with most of my "ideas", they remain as such only. I post it here as a reminder to myself as something I have "to do" at some point in the future. Hopefully someone else who is more technically capable than I am can succeed in doing this first ?
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