Sound and Fury

A note: the best Firefox extension ever is really hard to install on Ubuntu. It just doesn't work. I tried installing the normal way, I tried fiddling with the permissions on the main components directory, and I even tried installing as root. No dice.

But then. Then! It occurred to me that Ubuntu, being all bleeding-edge and stuff, uses the very latest in compilers, and is binary-incompatible with the rest of the world. So, the two libraries that get installed would probably never work. But they are simply stolen from Thunderbird, and Ubuntu has Thunderbird! So for Ubuntu 5.10, this install procedure actually works:

Be sure you completely remove Spellbound and all of its libraries before you do any of this; the libraries only get in the way.

sudo apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird
cd /usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/components
sudo cp libmyspell.so libspellchecker.so ../../mozilla-firefox/components/
cd ../../mozilla-firefox/components/
sudo ln -s ../../../share/myspell/dicts myspell

Then, and only then (not before) install only the extension by going here.

If you lack root access, you can try putting the libraries in the appropriate place in your profile. That would probably work too.