xfce4-dict and WordNet

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello Enrico,

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Enrico Tröger <enrico.troeger at uvena.de> wrote:
> Debian has a dict-wn package including WN 3.0, see
> http://packages.debian.org/lenny/dict-wn.
> I guess downloading the package, extracting the contents and copying
> the dictionary file with the index file into /usr/share/dictd should do
> the trick.
>
That's rather curious. They probably performed the upgrade themselves.
On Gentoo the dictd files are in /usr/lib/dict/. And the trick did
work! Now Xfce4 Dict gives me also:
"wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"
n 1: an expression of greeting; "every morning they exchanged
polite hellos" [syn: {hello}, {hullo}, {hi}, {howdy}, {how-
do-you-do}]"

I was also rather surprised that Xarchiver dealt with the .deb package
without asking many questions.


>
> Regarding the proxy problem:
>
Thank you for taking a look.


> Obviously, option a) is the better one as there are no changes in the
> code necessary. But I'm not sure whether and how it will work.
> So, could you test it?
>
> For reference see
> ftp://ftp.kstu-kai.ru/os/unix/socks/how2socksify.html. There is a
> script mentioned called "runsocks". This is what you need to get and
> then run it with xfce4-dict, without having tested it, I guess it will
> be something like:
>
> runsocks xfce4-dict -i
>
I was unable to download runsocks; the site seems down, and I failed
to track a mirror. I tried however tsocks [4], but soon realised that
it was pretty senseless, since I have an HTTP proxy server.

This prompted me to resume my search of a generic proxy solution (e.g.
for any application accessing the Internet), and it seems I found it
[1] [2]. I did not yet try proxytunnel [5], but proxychains [6] looks
promising: "Supports HTTP, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 proxy servers".

"Looks", since unfortunately, for the last couple of months, I have a
particularly unruly proxy server. It allows intermittent connections
to the server, and currently only Opera and Pidgin can deal with it
properly (at times; one of the reasons for the delay in my answer).
Thus, having configured it correctly, I always fail to connect
anything through proxychains: the server refuses connections. Would be
great if someone following this thread, and herself behind a proxy,
could test whether proxychains and xfce4-dict interact correctly.

On a different note, I would like to suggest adding the English
language Wiktionary to the default list of web-content dictionaries.
At times it is preferred to dictionaries like wn.

Regards,
Liviu

[1] http://bayxao.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/transparent-socks-proxy-client/
[2] http://bayxao.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/transparent-socks-proxy-client-2/
[3] http://proxychains.sourceforge.net/howto.html
[4] http://gentoo-portage.com/net-proxy/tsocks
[5] http://gentoo-portage.com/net-misc/proxytunnel
[6] http://gentoo-portage.com/net-misc/proxychains