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Running Kurso de Esperanto on Ubuntu 8.10

Today I decided to learn Esperanto. Best way to start seems to be Kurso, a gratis program. So...

...I downloaded Kurso3.0.deb and installed it. You might have 3 issues running this program in Ubuntu:

  1. No way to start the program

Installing the program does not add a menu entry for it. So click the Gnome Panel, pick “Add to panel...”, then “Custom Application Launcher”, then type:

Name: Kurso
Command: kurso

You may also click the button at the left to choose a nice icon. That’s it, now you can easily launch the program.

  1. /usr/share/kurso/tradukoj

The second problem that might happen is a message about lacking write access to the directory /usr/share/kurso/tradukoj. Another symptom is, clicking on the Settings button does not display the configuration screen.

A solution would be to type the following in a console:

cd /usr/share/kurso/
ls -l # prints out the contents of the kurso directory
sudo chmod 666 tradukoj
ls -l

This sets write permissions on that directory. Now you can restart the program, the message is gone and you can open the Settings screen.

  1. Sounds problem

You might get no sound for playback or recording. The solution is:

  1. Install mpg321:
sudo apt-get install mpg321

b) Open the Settings screen, switch to the Sound/Internet tab, and leave it like this:

MP3 player:    mpg321
WAV recorder:  aplay
WAV player:    arecord --duration=3 --rate=44100
Browser:       firefox
e-mail client: thunderbird

If you are really paying attention, you might notice that it doesn’t make sense to pick “aplay” to record and “arecord” to play. This is not my mistake; in this version (3.0) of Kurso, they messed up the 2 labels.

There you go, fully functional Kurso.