How to make a word list from an aspell dictionary

I am working on something that needs a list of words, without regard to american vs. british or accents or anything: just has to be as many words as possible.  There are a whole bunch of aspell dictionaries available.  First expand the files:

preunzip *.wl

Then merge into a single list, eliminating duplicates:

sort –unique –ignore-case *.wl >list.txt

In additon, I want everything to be UTF-8:

iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 list.txt >ulist.txt

Pretty simple.  The merged english word list has 137,883 words.

Stop GEdit opening FTP files as read-only

I use Debian’s “Places -> connect to server…” dialog to setup connections to a couple FTP servers. Copying and such like work fine, but when I try to use GEdit, it always opens the file read-only. I can “Save As” to the exact file, so it wasn’t a permission problem. The trick is in some totally obscure config file. Here’s the (in GUI) steps to fix it:

1. Run gconf-editor
2. Open the tree to /apps/gedit-2/preferences/editor/save
3. Edit writable_vfs_schemes
4. Add ftp to the list

Voila. Gedit saving FTP. Via the kaylus on the Ubuntu Forums, but it is the same in Debian Etch.

VMWare Server on a headless Debian Etch

I recently had to install VMWare Server on a server that didn’t have the GUI bits installed.  This is the list of additional packages that need to be installed for VMWare to install:

apt-get install psmisc libxrender1 libxt6

Then it will install, and the VMs can have GUI even though the host doesn’t!