as days pass by

I recently discovered that there's an old software edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the second edition) on archive.org for download. Not sure how legal this is, mind, but I thought it would be useful to get it running on my Ubuntu machine. So here's how I did that.

Firstly, download the file; that will give you a file called Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition).iso, which is a CD image. We want to unpack that, and usefully there is 7zip in the Ubuntu archives which knows how to unpack ISO files.¹ So, unpack the ISO with 7z x "Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition).iso". That will give you two more files: OED2.DAT and SETUP.EXE. The .DAT file is, I think, all the dictionary entries in some sort of binary format (and is 600MB, so be sure you have the space for it). You can then run wine SETUP.EXE, which will install the software using wine, and that's all good.² Choose a folder to install it in (I chose the same folder that SETUP.EXE is in, at which point it will create an OED subfolder in there and unpack a bunch of files into it, including OED.EXE).

That's the easy part. However, it won't quite work yet. You can see this by running wine OED/OED.EXE. It should start up OK, and then complain that there's no CDROM.

This is because it expects there to be a CDROM drive with the OED2.DAT file on it. We can set one up, though; we tell Wine to pretend that there's a CD drive connected, and what's on it. Run winecfg, and in the Drives tab, press Add… to add a new drive. I chose D: (which is a common Windows drive letter for a CD drive), and OK. Select your newly added D: drive and set the Path to be the folder where OED2.DAT is (which is wherever you unpacked the ISO file). Then say Show Advanced and change the drive Type to CD-ROM to tell Wine that you want this new drive to appear to be a CD. Say OK.

Now, when you wine OED/OED.EXE again, it should start up fine! Hooray, we're done! Except…

…that's not good. The app runs, but it looks like it's having font issues. (In particular, you can select and copy the text, even though it looks like a bunch of little squares, and if you paste that text into somewhere else it's real text! So this is some sort of font display problem.)

Fortunately, the OED app does actually come with the fonts it needs. Unfortunately, it seems to unpack them to somewhere (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM)³ that Wine doesn't appear to actually look at. What we need to do is to install those font files so Linux knows about them. You could click them all to install them, but there's a quicker way; copy them, from where the installer puts them, into our own font folder.

To do this...

• first make a new folder to put them in: mkdir ~/.local/share/fonts/oed.
• Then find out where the installer put the font files, as a real path on our Linux filesystem: winepath -u "C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM". Let's say that that ends up being /home/you/.wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/system
• Copy the TTF files from that folder (remembering to change the first path to the one that winepath output just now): cp /home/you/.wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/system/*.TTF ~/.local/share/fonts/oed
• And tell the font system that we've added a bunch of new fonts: fc-cache

And now it all ought to work! Run wine OED/OED.EXE one last time…

1. and using 7zip is much easier than mounting the ISO file as a loopback thing ↩
2. There's a Microsoft Word macro that it offers to install; I didn't want that, and I have no idea whether it works ↩
3. which we can find out from OED/INSTALL.LOG ↩