Notes on the Debian package of gnuchess
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gnuchess no longer comes packaged with an opening book, due to build time
and size considerations. It is strongly recommended that you install the
gnuchess-book package to have a good working opening book for gnuchess.

If you insist on creating your own opening book, find a PGN file with grand-
master games, move it into a directory where you have write permissions,
start gnuchess from that directory, type 'book add <filename>', wait some
time (depends on the size of the PGN), and if it is finished, type 'quit'.
You should now have a file 'book.bin' in your current directory, which is
used as an opening book if you start gnuchess in that directory. If you want
a system-wide opening book, copy it to

  /usr/share/games/gnuchess/book.bin

and enjoy. (There are some caveats in this whole procedure, because the
gnuchess PGN parser is not overly smart, so it might choke on complicated
PGN. Furthermore it checks the names of the players against a hard-coded
list of names, mostly grandmasters. If it does not match, the opening is not
added to the opening book.)

Lukas Geyer