How to install Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English in Ubuntu

The focus of this article is to express how to install Longman Contemporary English Dictionary version 5 in Ubuntu in simple and easy steps. The first part of the article talks about the features and background of Longman dictionary then common issues of installing the dictionary in the Ubuntu will be explained and finally the procedure of installation will be expressed with some hints at the end.

Background

Longman dictionary is one of most the famous and favorite dictionary among other dictionaries for English learners. This dictionary is distributed in the form of book and application in CD/DVD. Recently lot of effort has been done to port the application for different mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, etc. At the moment the users can purchase the mobile edition of Longman dictionary from iTunes, Google Play and Windowsphone website.

Version 5 of this dictionary is the latest edition of the application which supports desktop computer operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as well as mobile platforms. Many enhancements have been done in this edition such as supporting both British and American pronunciation, adding writing assistant section, adding Thesaurus dictionary and many more. For getting more information about this version please visit the official Longman website from the references.

How to install Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English in Ubuntu

Since the dictionary is not issued in the form of RPM and DEB package, therefore it is necessary to work with Terminal for installing the application which may be difficult for the novice users. The total process of installation is done in 3 stages.

Copying and preparing the necessary files
Installing the dictionary
Cleaning up

Copying and preparing necessary files

At first insert the DVD of the dictionary into your system and copying all folders and files to your local computer or hard disk. Then open a terminal and cd to the path which you copied the files and folders. For instance, cd ~/longman.

The next step is to give appropriate permission to the folder which contains folders and files of the dictionary for installing it.

Chmod command is used for giving permission to file(s) and folder(s). For getting more information about this command type man chmod in terminal.

Giving permission is easy and can be done just with typing the following command in terminal.

$ sudo chmod 777 [path_of_dict/linux/setup.sh]

For example,

$ sudo chmod 777 ~/longman/linux/setup.sh

Hint: since this folder will be deleted after completing installation full access is given to the folder and there is no worry about it. Otherwise, giving full access to file(s) or folder(s) is not recommended and could decrease the security of the computer.

Installing the dictionary

Before continuing this section make sure that prerequisite packages of this dictionary (such glibc) is already installed on your machine. This stage is the most crucial step of installing the dictionary and it depends on the architecture of your installed Ubuntu system (32, 64 bit).

Installing Longman dictionary is quite easy and could be done in following two steps.

Cd to the path which ‘setup.sh’ exists.
Run setup.sh file.

Example:

$ cd ~/longman/linux
$ ./setup.sh

Now setup file will open and ask few questions regarding installation agreement and the path which program will install which is simple and easy to answer and then the setup will start to install the dictionary in the machine.

Hint: The setup file does not allow to the users who installed Ubuntu X64 to install the dictionary and gives The setup program seems to have failed on amd64/unknown error. For installing Longman dictionary for 64 bit architecture just the users need to rename the x86 in the /longman/linux/setup.data/bin/Linux/ path to amd64 and run the setup file again.

Cleaning up

Now the dictionary is installed and it is ready to run. The setup should have created a file in your desktop with LDOCE5.desktop which is not executable at the moment because it does not have permission to run. Therefore, for make the desktop file executable just run chmod command such as follows:

$ sudo chmod 777 ldoce5.desktop

After running this command you should be able to run Longman dictionary by double clicking on its icon.

Hint: Bear in mind that sometimes a file which contains the path of the dictionary will be deleted automatically and then if you click on the icon of the program, it will open but it will not go to the dictionary and will not response to mouse click, as a result it is highly recommended to back up from the file in ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#Security/FlashPlayerTrust/ldoce5.cfg.

Hint: If the application does not run and gives “error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” message then just try to install ia32-libs-gtk packages with following command.

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-gtk

References

Ubuntu forums which the article is written based on the post from eltma user.
Longman dictionary official website
Longman dictionary DVD-ROM readme file.