The story starts with electronic German dictionaries, which were M$ Windows-only enabled...
I have found
Duden - Deutsches Universalwörterbuch. This one worked under
Linux/X Windows and was based on Office-Bibliothek.
The interface is not perfect, but you can get used to it. I have
also noticed a huge memory leak (version 3.0.4) so that after a few
days of automated queries (do not ask me how I did that -- simply
brute force) the application has allocated 1.9GB RAM (and swap).
Next pleasant surprise happened to me when I bought
Langenscheidts e-Großwörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache
(much, much easier explanations to understand in comparison to Duden,
but Langenscheid's dictionary shows some differences in hyphenation
rules and here Duden seems to show the correct ones).
Langenscheidts dictionary comes with Windows-only Application... The
catch here was that it was using PC-Bibliothek.
The next step you can do with any PC-Bibliothek-based
dictionary is to download Office-Bibliothek,
install it, then choose "Neues Buch
installieren" (Install new book/dictionary), point to the
*.inf file placed in
data/ directory of your new bought CD and the dictionary is
ready to play with ;)
For others, who need to use dictionaries produced by Young Digital Poland (YDP)
(pl<=>en and pl<=>de) there is an interface running under Linux
(and probably other unix'es too)
Check: Linuxowy interfejs Słownika YDP and Interfejs
angielsko-polskiego słownika Collinsa