xboard is just a graphical user interface for chess. You also need a chess engine to play against (or you need to use xboard to connect to an internet chess server or as a viewer for a saved game file; see "man xboard" for the possibilities).
On your Linux distro, xboard is configured to use fairymax as the chess engine to play against by default, but it looks like you don't have fairymax installed. Try installing the fairymax package too and you won't get that error.
Hi, I recently installed xboard on Linux Mint 18.2, but when I try to do something, the message below appears and the program quits:
"xboard: Error writing to first chess program: Pipe quebrado"
attached the debug file