The Bible is a book that has transcended time, languages, persecution, fire, prohibition, disbelief and denial. It is a book that has changed lives and challenged evil. It has show the love of God to the world, and told the history of time through God’s eyes. But despite being the single greatest best seller in the world and appearing in over 2200 different languages, its presence in the GNU/Linux world has been somewhat lacking. But that is all about to change with the introduction of a very unique open source bible study application known as “Bible Time”.
Bible time does for free on Linux/BSD what was once only available in printed form or in expensive closed source Windows only applications by providing a very powerful and useful bible study application right on your PC under Linux or BSD. The BibleTime project has been around since 1999, but only recently has it come onto the radar of the general Open Source community to any major degree. Currently it’s available in source code, Debian, PC-BSD or Gentoo packages, or via the ports collection on Freebsd. You will also need at least KDE3 or some of its source packages, CLucene and the Sword package to get started. Installation is pretty painless and only takes about 1-2 minutes via packages, or about 20-30 minutes via source. The installation application also very kindly inserts a menu entry for you in KDE under the “Utilities” menu folder.
The first time you run BibleTime, it will ask you to install Sword and update any included elements of BibleTime to the latest versions. The creators of BibleTime also did something I believe is very smart. In the initial welcome window, as seen below, they include a warning to all persecuted believers, or those fearing persecution, to NOT use the remote update feature if they do not want to risk detection. In some countries, such as the Islamic nations or over in Asia where certain death awaits those found to be a Christian, this is a wise warning to have. Especially if some who use the software might not be aware of the risk involved in countries like this. For those who live in America and other countries where freedom of religion is practiced, this warning does not apply.
Library installation is the first step you should go through after starting BibleTime for the first time. The number of languages supported by the software in each of six categories is quite impressive. While note every category has every language covered, and the number of available languages varies from two to over fifty, the amount of languages covered is very impressive. Even the total number of available offerings under each sub category is jaw dropping. There’s some sub categories that have over seventy five different choices to choose from including items from Scofield, Luther and Wesley. Just be sure that when you’re choosing what you want that you don’t go overboard as just checking items in the categories will net you a lot of stuff to download. It’ll only take about five to six minutes out of your day to filter through what’s offered to make sure you only download and install the items you want.
Due note that these extra items all come form the Sword project, so this can’t all be attributed to the BibleTime developers. However, the fact that they’re working so closely with the Sword project can, as the two projects are complimentary of each other. The only thing I would suggest for future versions is the addition of simple descriptions for each element under each sub-category. The categories and subcategories are self explanatory enough, but who’s going to know what DBD is unless they’ve done their homework in advance. They may know about the actual DBD Daily Devotional for example, but may not recognize its abbreviated name when grabbing additional features. And it seems a bit counter productive to make those installing this have to do a lot of research to find out what each item is. Thus a simple one or two line description explaining what each item is would be helpful.
Download and install of the updated bible tools, commentaries and extras takes anywhere from 1-2 minutes up to a full hour depending on how much you’ve chosen to download and the speed of your internet connection. Dialup users may take as much as five to eight hours to download everything in the event that a large number of resources are chosen, or just 10-15 minutes for the bare essentials.
After the updates complete it’s only about a minute to complete a few last configuration steps, and then you’re ready to begin using the program. Surprisingly it’s very incredibly easy to use. It’s also surprisingly powerful. I’ve used QuickVerse for years and there’s no way that QuickVerse can even begin to touch what BibleTime offers. The interface is very well organized and simple to use, it allows you to combine several different items all together at the same time from the same window without cluttering your workspace, while still giving you point and click access to everything you need in front of you. The search tool is also very powerful, allowing you to find texts within either the bible itself, or any open work you have at the time. I did find a problem though that seems to crash the program to the desktop under certain search conditions. A minor bug I’m sure the developers will have fixed soon. It wasn’t an actual core dump, but more of a bug that closes down the program instead.
Other than that minor bug, I really found the program to be quite nice and very easy to work with. If the developers have already packed this much into the software so far, I’m very eagerly looking forward to upcoming versions and all the amazing extras that should be offered from those as well. If you get the time, support both the BibleTime and the Sword projects. What they’ve done so far is fantastic and is a tool that is very needed on Linux at this time.
To download bibletime, you can either go here to the BibleTime download page, or you can install this wonderful piece of software via your package or ports collections. The software is currently available for most Debian or Gentoo based linux distributions, Freebsd and PC-BSD. There is no currentwindows or mac port for this software.
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