Thesaurus On Ubuntu 9.04

Need an excellent thesaurus? Tired of searching the web for every single word? We have this excellent, completely offline and easy-to-use thesaurus named Artha. There may be other thesauruses as well, but I was really enchanted by the simplicity of this WebNet based free English thesaurus.

Installation

1. Artha requires three development libraries which are wordnet, glib and gtk+. These have to be installed prior to the installation of the thesaurus. Open the terminal and install each of them one by one.

varsha@varsha-laptop:~$ sudo aptitude install wordnet-dev
varsha@varsha-laptop:~$ sudo aptitude install libnotify-dev
varsha@varsha-laptop:~$ sudo aptitude install libdbus-glib-1-dev

There are some optional requirements, namely notify and dbus-glib. To install them,

varsha@varsha-laptop:~$ sudo aptitude install libnotify-dev
varsha@varsha-laptop:~$ sudo aptitude install libdbus-glib-1-dev

Doing this will install the latest version of these libraries. Note that you can also use apt-get instead of aptitude.

2. Go to the download page and download any of the packages. I chose the artha-0.9.1.tar.gz package.

3. Download the package and save it on your Desktop.

4. Extract the downloaded package.

5. cd into the extracted directory.

varsha@varsha-laptop:~$ cd /home/varsha/Desktop/artha-0.9.1

6. Configure, using the following command.

varsha@varsha-laptop:~/Desktop/artha-0.9.1$ ./configure

To install in some other directory other than the usual /usr/local,

varsha@varsha-laptop:~/Desktop/artha-0.9.1$ ./configure --prefix=/desired_directory

Read the INSTALL file.

7. To compile,

varsha@varsha-laptop:~/Desktop/artha-0.9.1$ make

8. Become a superuser.

varsha@varsha-laptop:~/Desktop/artha-0.9.1$ su
Password:

9. Then install,

varsha@varsha-laptop:~/Desktop/artha-0.9.1# make install

This completes the installation.

You will find Artha under Applications-> Accessories.