Ubuntu Productivity

As a Christian I am keenly interested in software that can help when studying the Bible. Coming from the Mac OS where there are no good Bible software offerings anything would be a blessing. So, for all you fellow Ubuntu-using Christians here is what I found.

GnomeSword 2 — 4 Stars

GnomeSword 2 is the only Gnome-native app of the bunch (I am running Ubuntu 8.04 with the Gnome desktop.) It is based on Crosswire’s Sword project.

Overall this is a great Bible study application. While it is very simple, lacking many of the features of the more advanced apps (like Sword Searcher and e-Sword discussed below), there are a few things that Gnome Sword excels at. It integrates into the default Ubuntu desktop very well. Navigating to new books and chapters is very easy. The text of each chapter is displayed in a clean font. But what it really excels at is finding and adding new Bible texts (or any text.) It has a very simple method of connecting to Crosswire’s remote server, allowing you to browse all available translations in any language. When you have checked all the texts you want it downloads and installs them in one fell swoop. Here is a screen shot of the Module Manager.

BibleTime 1.6.4 — 3 Stars

Like GnomeSword, BibleTime is based on the sword project. It it very similar to GnomeSword with one very obvious exception—it is written for the K desktop environment.

It has one very fun feature that sets it apart. After searching for a word in the Bible you can press the “analyze” button and see a visualization of that word’s occurrence throughout the books of the Bible. Sweet.

Sword Searcher 5 — 2 Stars

Sword Searcher is not a Linux application, but it can very easily run on Ubuntu Linux via Wine (an application that allows any Window app to run on Linux) I downloaded the demo exe file and it installed perfectly with Wine 0.9.59. Sword Searcher is a nice application, but is costs $50. Given the other three free apps discussed here I did not seriously consider using it so I did not spend much time demoing it. However, for those interested in spending money on good Bible study software it is much more feature rich than the above two.

e-Sword — 5 Stars

e-Sword is undoubtedly my favorite of all. It is a Windows application so it runs via Wine. This means it does not look as pretty as GnomeSword. And the installation is a bit more complicated given the current state of Wine, so you must follow the directions at the Ubuntu forums for getting e-Sword to run on Linux. However, after working through these instructions, which took about 8 minutes, I had e-sword installed, along with the ESV module, running perfectly on Ubuntu Linux 8.04

Here is the image browser that allows you to look through maps and the like. Nice.

Conclusion

After spending some time with these pieces of software I have kept all three free apps. I have no need to spend $50 when the others can do so much for free so I ditched SwordSearcher 5.

I kept all three because they each have strengths and weaknesses. GnomeSword is just pleasant to use because it is a native Gnome application so it looks very nice. It also opens very fast and is super-easy to navigate. While I love e-Sword it must run in the Wine environment, which currently does not anti-alias fonts, so the text is harder to read when staring at the screen for a long time. And I kept BibleTime because I love that search visualization!

Do you know of any good Bible study software available for Ubuntu Linux? If so please share!