Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 5 (LDOCE5) software won’t install on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS, but it is not a big deal since I wouldn’t use the official software. I use the great ldoce5viewer -a python based application- instead. It requires ldoce5.data directory from the LDOCE5 DVD-ROM. ldoce5viewer extracts the data, creates its index for incremental search out of ldoce5.data folder, and it is ready to go. I find it much more user-friendly and faster than the official software.

Here is how I built and installed ldoce5viewer on my distro.

  1. Install prerequisite packages.
sudo apt-get install python-qt4 pyqt4-dev-tools python-lxml \
    python-gst0.10 gstreamer0.10-plugins-good \
    python-qt4-phonon checkinstall
    
# distro python-whoosh won't work, use this instead
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install --upgrade pip
sudo pip install whoosh
  1. Git clone ldoce5viewer, build and install.
git clone https://github.com/ciscorn/ldoce5viewer.git
cd ldoce5viewer
make build
sudo checkinstall
  1. Copy ldoce5.data from LDOCE5 DVD-ROM to /usr/share/ldoce5viewer or anywhere you like and change access permissions to read-only for regular files and read & execute for directories, otherwise you can’t cd into the directories. Adjust directory names for your computer.
sudo su
mkdir /usr/share/ldoce5viewer
cp -R /media/gokhanettin/LDOCE5/ldoce5.data /usr/share/ldoce5viewer/ && sync
find /usr/share/ldoce5viewer/ldoce5.data -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 555 
find /usr/share/ldoce5viewer/ldoce5.data -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 444
exit

Fire up ldoce5viewer and locate /usr/share/ldoce5viewer/ldoce5.data when it asks. After a while, it should complete indexing and words should appear as you type on it.

If you want to remove ldoce5viewer and ldoce5.data from your computer run the following commands.

sudo dpkg -r ldoce5viewer
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/ldoce5viewer/ldoce5.data