Crafty is a popular open-source chess engine that can be used to benchmark your CPU speed and is part of SPEC2000 benchmark. It is a chess engine in the sense that it doesn’t have any GUI; it support a popular Chess GUI protocol known as Winboard protocol and can connect to any GUI that supports that protocol. You can also play chess on the CLI version if you know your chess notations and don’t mind typing chess moves.

The benchmark itself is very basic. It analyzes pre-determined chess games positions and calculates the number of “nodes” (moves) per second till certain “depth” is reached and displays the total NPS as well as the average NPS. This type of benchmark gained interest and recognition since the development of Deep Blue Chess Computer and it’s games against Gary kasparov. Deep blue claimed to have calculated 200 million positions per second in 1997. In comparison my dual-core laptop calculates 1.1 million positions per second. I have seen a high-end quad core calculate up to 6 millions NPS.

Just type in “bench” on the command prompt and depending on your hardware it should take somewhere around few seconds to few minutes to finish the benchmark. Debian or Debian-based users should be able to download it from their repositories. Others can compile it themselves by grabbing the source from it’s FTP.

You can’t do this with firefox:

Not to be outdone, someone was able to achieve this with Firefox on Ubuntu. Which error is more dramatic? :)

I know I am late to the party but I just came across this nifty boot loader that compiles Linux kernel from the source and boots from it. TCCBOOT uses TinyCC as it’s compiler of choice. I can’t think of any way how this could be useful but this is one of those things you could do if you wanted to, with Linux. Probably has the same level of nerdiness as you would get from logstalgia.

Edit: On second thought, maybe the whole purpose is to see what can be done with TinyCC compiler.

Happy (belated) New Year my fellow Linux junkies! 2008 has been a great year for LinuxHaxor. We have gained a lot of new users, both in terms of traffic and feed readers. We got linked from some of the best tech sources out there, including CBS news - Cnet – Lifehacker – Slashdot – PC World – Computer World and many many Linux Blogs and Forums. If you are new to this site you might want to check out the top 10 posts of 2008 in terms of both views and comments:

1) 10 Finger Licking Linux Desktop Themes

2) 30 Cool Acer Aspire One Hacks

3) Linpus Linux Lite Review

4) Make Linux: Harder – Better – Faster

5) Firefox Minefield: Faster Than Chrome

6) 5 Anti-Linux Sites You Must Follow!

7) Linux Myths: Busted!

8) 15 Tips For a Better Linux Experience

9) The State of Linux Docks

10) Acer Aspire One Review

While 2009 might not be the year of the Linux, there are many new developments and releases to look forward to in this year and I hope you will be following us as we write, discuss and argue all the little details.