you may be aware of the kthesaurus in the koffice suit. it has two panes - one for the thesaurus and one for wordnet. this is how the wordnet part was made functional, on this suse 8.0 box, using kde 3.1.1.

wordnet can be downloaded from http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

the package we are referring to is wordnet-1.7.1.tar.gz

when downloaded it can be unpacked with

 tar -zxvf wordnet-1.7.1.tar.gz       

in your home directory.

cd to the directory it creates

 cd /home/magpie/wordnet-1.7.1       

the package can be installed with

 make binworld platform=linux       

in my case this had to be done as root. the make script stopped with permission errors when this was done as user.

if this completes ok - (check for error messages) the program can be run with the command wn. i had a further step to go. wordnet was not working in kde yet. the main program files are stored in /usr/local/wordnet-1.7.1. by leaving this main directory as owner root, user root and changing all the permissions beneath this to owner bin, user bin i was able to run wn (inside kthesaurus) ok. that is, all of the permissions of the /bin, /dict, /doc, /include, /lib, /man directories.

start kthesaurus, and type in a word. note, nothing appears until this is done. wordnet will then display its information on the subject you require, and the kthesaurus will provide lots of alternatives.

in kword, kthesaurus and wordnet can be used by right clicking on a word and selecting the show related words menu. kthesaurus will appear.