Abiword and French

[New_Boy]

I've bought one of these (CnMbook) for my 12 yo son (who suffers from dyslexia) to take notes in class.  I installed the spell checker addon for Abiword (from the CnM site) & it works well for English.

I'd like to add the capability for French.  I can see what looks like the right software / files on the Debian site but as someone who is far more familiar with Windows than Linux I'm not sure how to go about it.

I'd very much appreciate any hints / tips about how to do this & also any thoughts / suggestions anyone may have on how to make this great little device even more useful for my son.

Thanks,
Kev

 

[wicknix]

Not 100% sure about your abiword question, but to make the laptop more useful there are a few options.
A) Install some form of 3MX (retro or 3.1 preferably).
B) Install Debian Etch (mostly working but still isn't 100% there yet)
C) Head over to http://3mx.taita.co.uk and install some more games or applications.
D) Browse/search this forum for links to other software from various sites and users as a lot has been added or linked in the last year.

Cheers.

[New_Boy]

Hi - "your fame precedes you"     Thank you for taking the time to reply.  Hope you don't mind if I ask a couple of questions.  I've been doing a bit of research.

1.  For the spell checker, I followed the instructions from aspell for installation. The "configure" script added some paths to "Makefile.pre" and wrote it as "Makefile".  However, when I typed "make" I got "sh: make: not found".

2.  The Abiword installed is 2.4.5.  There is a later version (2.6) available as a package from the Debian site.  This comes as a ".deb" file and appears to need "dpkg" to unpack and install it.  Same as above, typing "dpkg" returns "sh: dpkg: not found".

Have these facilities been removed to stop "amateurs" like me bricking their devices, or am I just doing the wrong thing?

Rgds,
Kev

[wicknix]

I'm on lunch at work so i cant fully answer this but i'll whip out a few answers quick.

1) You can find aspell on 3mx.taita.co.uk already packed in .xap form.

2) You cant use abiword 2.6 from debian, it's not in debian etch repositories. Anything newer than etch wont work due to libc version changes and 2.6 kernel. You can extract .deb packages from debian etch mipsel repositories and repack them as .xap however. There are a few scripts to do that linked in this forum somewhere. Also no development software is installed in the defaultOS which is why you have no 'make'. Dpkg isn't installed either as the manufacturors decided to strip the system and create their own .xap style of packaging instead. As like you said, probably to keep people from breaking their machine.

Cheers.

[New_Boy]

Sir - thank you - you are a gentleman.  I hope others take note.

Rgds,
Kev