Installing Spellbound Dictionaries on Linux

Spellbound is a great extension for Firefox which allows you to spell-check your text forms. It's a great toy for people who frequently blog and post on message boards.

I installed it a while ago on the old knop hd, and forgot how painful it was. Main problem here is installing dictionaries. You can get them from here and they do seem to install just fine - but they do not work. I spent 15 minutes installing, and removing them and Spellbound simply refused to acknowledge their existence.

Turns out that these files need to be installed in "[installation folder]/components/myspell" - at least that's what they suggest on the spellbound site. What the hell does that mean?

By trial and error I finally figured out that on linux this means:

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell/

And, strangely enough I did not have that directory at all. So I did this as root:


cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components
mkdir myspell
chmod a+w myspell


You need to have write permission in the myspell folder to install the dictionaries. Once you install them you can remove the permission for security reasons. After you do this, spellbound works like a charm :)

Tags: firefox, mozilla, mozilla firefox, spellbound, firefox spellbound, mozilla firefox spellbound, myspell