BibleTime (Debian/KDE)

In Dec 2006 I found that the Bibletime package would not install on my Knoppix-based Debian/KDE box. The problematic dependency was libsword5c2a, which vanished from the Debian repositories in December, apparently after a year of not having some dependency problems corrected.

After some web searching, I found a url for the package (in Ubuntu Universe) as well as the following instructions.

wget http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/s/sword/libsword5c2a_1.5.8-8_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install libtasn1-2
sudo dpkg -i libsword5c2a_1.5.8-8_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install gnomesword

On my Knoppix-installed Debian system (1) I didn't need the second line (already up-to-date), (2) I wanted to install bibletime (KDE) rather than gnomesword (Gnome) in the fourth line, and (3) I certainly didn't stick to Ubuntu's sudo fixation.

This all worked perfectly. The only issue seems to be that the package is no longer in the main Debian repositories

What's good:

• It looks lovely.
• The bookshelf manager is brilliant; downloading and installing books from an extensive library is simple.

What doesn't seem to be there:

• There's no kind of betacode (or similar character translation) to make multilingual searches practical.
• There's apparently support for accented Greek characters and morphological parsing in the configuration screens, but neither appear implemented, at least in the WHNU text I'm using with the Gentium typeface.

I'll probably keep this on my system, but for my language studies I'm now looking into using Libronix/Logos or Bibleworks under VMWARE.