[CS-FSLUG] an Intro

[Jon Glass]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Jason Franklin <jpfagapeu at mac.com> wrote:
>  Welcome aboard Jon.  I too am an extremely minor character in the CS-
>  FSLUG play.   I'm curious about your Bible Time port to Mac OSX.  I'm
>  not all that trilled with Mac Sword (I too am a mac user).

First of all, thanks to everybody for the warm welcome! You make me
feel like I'm home. ;-)

Now, I must admit, I wasn't quite expecting questions off my first
post, but I shall try to answer as briefly as possible.

Our ministry is rather dull--at least in comparison to most others,
but you can learn a bit more about us on our web site:
<http://homepage.mac.com/jonglass/> is probably the best place to
start--you can see our current "blog" and the older pages which
contain some dated, but still rather valid info. I've gotta get our
latest (and rather bad) picture up.

As to Bibletime... hm... where to start? I'll just say this... I first
decided to do this back in June, while on vacation. I had just
installed Ubuntu onto my 'Book, and took that with me on vacation. I
fell in love with Bibletime, and remembered reading ages ago that
somebody had gotten it running under OS X, so I thought I might be
able to do it. Starting when I got back from vacation in June, I
finally got it to build and launch at the beginning of September! Now,
when I started, I knew _nothing_ about anything... So, I spent some
time trying to learn and understand how Linux and Unix work, tried
installing Darwin from scratch (installed, but it kept failing on
creating a user, so it never was much use for anything), ended up
installing GnuDarwin on my Mac, moved to Fink, and ended up with _two_
full installs of Gnome (one from GnuDarwin, the other from Fink), and
a full install of KDE--When I did that, I didn't realized that I only
needed KDE-base and KDE-libs for Bibletime, but I've enjoyed the
complete KDE environment, however, so I can't complain. After doing
all this, I eventually started trying to build Bibletime, but that was
_brutal_ as I didn't understand all the error messages, and had to
google every one of them. This was after first installing CLucene and
sword. I discovered that some librarys I had installed were not new
enough, so I had to update them (most went into /usr/local, but some I
accidently put into Fink's /sw/ tree) And also, I tried doing some
tweaks in the config file, but, in the end, I think I only needed to
do a --enable-static-clucene switch. It's embarassing to say it, but I
had my whole family running downstairs when I saw the splash screen
pop up. ;-) (yes, the whoops were rather loud!)

Now, as to _why_... Like you, I am a tad disappointed in MacSword as a
serious study tool. I use Accordance, too, but it is lacking a lot of
resources that are free in the Sword project (I would have to pay over
$150 to get only most, not all of what I get in Sword) Bibletime has
some cool features--preview of greek roots, including morphology,
without having Strongs showing, right-click search of those greek
roots, charting of results are merely the biggest features to me.
However, MacSword is about the most beautiful-looking and easiest to
read of all software I've ever seen--and you can view all the text of
a given text, including commentary, in one window (None of the other
Sword project apps do this) However, when I want to do serious study,
X11 and Bibletime are always the first apps the I launch.

P.S. I got Bibletime 1.6.3b to build, but 1.6.4 dies with some odd
errors re: ln.

-- 
 -Jon Glass
Krakow, Poland
<jonglass at usa.net>

"I don't believe in philosophies. I believe in fundamentals." --Jack Nicklaus