Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Looking for an honest man — on Linux PPC

Peter Heslin's Diogenes 3.1 is extremely cleanly designed, and ultra portable. The server functionality is written in perl, and the new user interface is a XUL application. One result is that Heslin can provide simple binary installations for Mac OS X, various Windows operating systems, and Linux on x86 architecture.

This design also makes it easy to install and run Diogenes on any operating system with perl and a XUL application environment. Using Ubuntu Linux 7.04 on a PPC system, for example, after you download and install the Linux version of Diogenes, you can run Diogenes at least three different ways:


1) use xulrunner to run the graphic interface

If xulrunner is not already installed on your system, use Synaptic or apt-get to install it. (xulrunner is in the Development section of the Ubuntu universe repository.) You can now start Diogenes from a terminal with the command
   xulrunner /usr/local/diogenes/application.ini


Better still, edit the properties for the Diogenes menu item that was created by the Diogenes installer. In the Launcher Properties, enter the command to start xulrunner as illustrated here. Now you can run diogenes from the menu selection.

2) use Firefox 3 to run the graphic interface

Version 3 of Firefox includes a full XUL environment that can run external XUL programs like Diogenes. Beta version 2 of FF3 was released in December; when a stable release version appears, look for it to show up as an upgrade to Firefox in your Ubuntu repository. When Firefox 3 is installed on your system, you may alternatively start Diogenes with the command
   firefox -app /usr/local/diogenes/application.ini

As with option 1, you can edit the Diogenes menu item to run this command.
Technically inclined users who are eager to play with the beta version can download source code for the beta release, and follow the very clear instructions here to install it. All the prerequisites are standard libraries that are available in Ubuntu repositories.

3) Browse and search texts from the command line

The command line user program (named dio) works just as it does on any other Linux. Run dio with no arguments to see its various options.


The importance of this flexibility is not that it opens up Diogenes to a vast number of Greek scholars using Linux PPC, Solaris, or some other particular operating system. Its importance is rather that it keeps Diogenes open to any platform meeting its simple requirements — including future platforms.

Diogenes on your XO laptop, iPhone, or other device, anyone?

12 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,
I am new to linux-Ubuntu and I am facing a strange problem.
I installed Diogenes-linux properly but it's impossible to see the authtab.dir when it opens the "where is the TLG database" window.

Therefore, I cant locate the tlg database, which is in /home/chris/Tlg

Any ideas on how to solve my problem;
Thanks in advance
Chris

Unknown said...

Hi,
I had the same problem and I simply changed the names of the files in my TLG directory which were in upercase into lowercase (in a terminal : cd /home/mytlgdirectory ; then : "for i in *; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`; done"(whithout quotes))
I hope it will also work for you
Julien

D said...

Thanks Juliu!. it also solved my problem.
Weird that they haven't included this correction on the Diogenes web page though..

Doc said...

Hi,

I'm using Diogenes on an Ubuntu Hardy (AMD64), but until now I've got no problem with it. From some days, but I don't know why nor when, it stopped working. I can run the programm only with the command "xulrunner /usr/local/diogenes/application.ini", but some functionalities (e.g. the dictionary) don't work. I suspect that the cause was the recent upgrade of perl, but I'm not sure. Any idea or solution?

Unknown said...

I have installed Diogenes under Ubuntu 9.10 and it can't find authtab.dir filed, although I gave the proper path in "Settings". There was a comment earlier on this site, advising to "change the names of the files in the TLG and PHI directories which were in upercase into lowercase". I quote the suggestion which did work for some commenters but not for me) "(in a terminal : cd /home/mytlgdirectory ; then : "for i in *; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`; done"(whithout quotes))" In fact, I was unable to perform the suggested change form uppercase to lowerc. Does anybody have a suggestion?
Thanks in advance,

Miklos from Bp.

Anonymous said...

My guess from digging around in Edit > Preferences is (I have Diogenes but not the CD-ROMs) that the official solution to Laertis and Saklovitij's problem is to create a diogenes.config file in the appropriate directory and add to it the line:

uppercase_files = 1

If one of you chaps with the treasure-trove tries this and it works, please let us all know!

Unknown said...

Yes, changing lowercase filenames in the authtab.dir to uppercase did the job. Although I used a software to do this maneuver, I guess Exoristos' suggestion will do. I don't remember the name of the software, but it can easily be found and installed.
Thank everyone for the comments.
By the way, I agree that Diogenes is the perfect thing!
Miklos
Budapest

Raúl Romo said...

OMG! you are the man!

Majid Ali said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Frazer said...

I have Diogenes installed on one of my linux machines and one of my windows machines, and I love it. Unfortunately I can't get it to work on my new Ubuntu 14.04 machine. Is there any chance you'd be able to help me out? It's having issues with the perl server.

Unknown said...

I too am having trouble getting diogenes to work with ubuntu 14.04 (64-bit). The problem seems to be that the 32-bit libraries are no longer all bundled together (into ia32libs), and the replacement packages don't work for diogenes. Or at least I can't get them to.

Any help would be infinitely appreciated - or at least very regularly, as I would otherwise use diogenes every day.

Manuel Berrón said...

También uso Ubuntu 14 y no puedo hacer correr Diogenes... Si bien el programa está instalado, al iniciarlo, a los pocos segundos, arroja este error "Unable to start perl server", y se cierra.
Si alguien tiene la respuesta, agradecido infinitamente.