Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

davids45 · Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 1159 Location: Chatswood, NSW

There's only one Linux genealogy program I know of, called "GRAMPS". It runs under Ubuntu so I imagine should happily run with Puppy.

As more old computers are becoming puppified for older people like me, could a Petget or similar be made available for GRAMPS?

As a PS to anyone who's searched the Puppy fora for genealogical software and comes across this, has such an anyone had any success using any of the Windows programs such as Legacy, The Master Genealogist, Roots Magic, etc, etc, with wine?

David S.

Henry · Joined: 29 Jul 2006 Posts: 865 Location: Oregon USA

Roots Magic is a great program and one I would really like to use with wine. I tried several times, and it seems to be within a mm of working. In fact it does work in most respects except that if you try to do something with an associated photo it shuts down.

Henry

mjg · Posted: Sat 03 Feb 2007, 07:56 Post subject:

There's not much software in Linux for genealogy. The easiest to run are probably Java based. If you have Java check this. I've got it running in Suse, but haven't tried Puppy.

Personally, I'm waiting for a web 2.0 browser-based solution. Geni will be the answer once it can import GEDCOM files.

bushybill · Joined: 02 Nov 2005 Posts: 10 Location: Western Colorado

Has anyone tried this program?
http://lifelines.sourceforge.net/
They have a Debian package...

Trobin · Joined: 18 Aug 2005 Posts: 977 Location: BC Canada

Out of sheer curiousity, what programs, basic, would a genealogist need?

I've had Ftree working in puppy, haven't maagaed to get Geneweb working, or Gramps as of yet.

http://www.ftree.org/

Genealogy is something I've dabbled with, but mainly in Windows.

davids45 · Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 1159 Location: Chatswood, NSW

G'day Trobin,
As far as I'm concerned about 'basic' software, it all depends on what you mean by 'genealogist'.
My opinions as an amateur genealogist, or perhaps in your terms, a serious dabbler ......
A professional (someone being paid to do someone else's family tree) probably needs something like 'The Master Genealogist' - TMG - which focuses heavily on collating and listing sources of family history data and generating printed reports, and less on visual presentation, particularly onto your monitor or as a web-page.
More GUI appealing programs, and more suitable for the amateur, someone doing her/his own family tree, would be Legacy, Roots Magic, Family Tree maker and many similar Windows-only programs. Most are free to try with money needed for getting a full version going. The Mormons have PAF as a fully free but less belled-and-whistled program.
Mac users get Reunion (their usual(?) choice of 1, but it is a very good program).
Most programs supposedly help set-up a web-page of the family data, and all can export data as (text-based) Gedcom files so textural stuff can be swapped via the Net and between programs of all OSs.

No one to my knowledge has reported any Windows genealogy program to run in Wine with Puppy. Roots Magic nearly gets there (installs, imports data from Windows via gedcom) but crashes if I try to add images.
Legacy (my preference) almost installs but comes up with an error box just before opening. I have not tried TMG via Wine.

Gramps ran for me with Ububtu (deb version) and has a Windows version which also worked for me as far as I tried it.
As of last night, using Pet installation of the 2.2.6 tar.gz gramps file, I get no dependency problem (a nice green box) but I can't the program to actually run. The "successful installation" messages or pop-up menu icons to start the program do not appear on rebooting (2.16 & 2.15CE). The undeb Puplet did not work at all - red box everytime.

Puppy has all the peripheral progams (spreadsheet, word-processor, html composer, browser, scanner, digital camera reader) to otherwise digitally handle the raw stuff I, or an amateur genealogist collects. Printing on paper depends on your printer, as usual with Linux.

The beauty of the genealogy program is to put all this material together in a single data base.

It's a big pity that there's apparently nothing in Puppy Linux yet for the hordes of family historians.

Hopefully we may soon be more happily dabbling,

David S.

Trobin · Joined: 18 Aug 2005 Posts: 977 Location: BC Canada

Then it wouold appear tht FTREE is the only genealogy program that will work in Puppy.

Edited to add:

At least out of the box. so to speak.

HairyWill · Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 2946 Location: Southampton, UK

I don't do geneology myself, has anyone tried GeneWeb?
http://geneweb.sourceforge.net/

muggins · Joined: 20 Jan 2006 Posts: 6749 Location: hobart

i had a quick look last night and it seems the already compiled geneweb-5.00 redhat rpm is the best option. (to compile from source it needs an ocaml compiler).

http://www.geneweb.org/ftp/Linux/RPMS/geneweb-5.00-FC3.i386.rpm

the tricky part is the configuration bit, which you can do on the commandline, or using a browser and gwsetup.

helamen · Joined: 16 Jan 2008 Posts: 1

I have managed to run PAF 5.0 in wine in Puppy 3.01 and Muppy.

I followed all the suggestions to run wine and then run PAF successfully with a database of over 3000 individuals.

Muppy has wine in it and runs well too.

I tried to run Legacy but at the last minute it says it had an automation error, I don't understand it. I wanted to run Legacy because Legacy has an automatic search of the IGI website.

So I am back in windoze running Legacy, only the one doze program that I like.

canerigal · Posted: Fri 18 Jan 2008, 10:55 Post subject:

I've been a year long forum reader but info regarding genealogy has inspired me to finally post.

I have been a researcher and genealogist for many years and have done work for other people. I suppose the most important feature for me would be flexibility with reports and stability. I have only tried the live CD Ubuntu with Gramps. I looked at a few others and tried Ftree but they were not what I wanted and with no one currently developing most of them I didn't even want to try them out.

Gramps program is nice but it wasn't reliable enough for me at the time and again, no one actively working on the project.

My hubby (Caneri) had tried to set up Gramps but he ran into problems with all the required gnome libraries and dependencies. It has to work and work all the time for me to use it (genealogists are extremely protective about their information)

I have watched Caneri use Puppy exclusively now for about a year and I like what I've seen with the Puppy OS as well as it's development and stability.

I currently use Legacy and Family Tree Maker. FTM latest version is very web integrated and with all their online search functions make it hard to give up, but maybe their new versions will make it more compatible with linux/puppy (or more complicated)

I would like to be able to run Puppy and have a good genealogy program as well.

Looking at the Gramps site recently there has been a renewed effort in development and a new version coming out.

Below is what they say are the Linux Package requirements for Gramps to run in debian/ubuntu and fedora/redhat. Maybe this would be useful for those that know these things.
(Gramps website http://www.gramps-project.org/)

Linux package requirements
Debian/Ubuntu -
python,Required (needs version 2.3 or later) [does 2.3 include set()?]
pygtk2,Required (needs 2.6.0 or greater)
gnome-python,Required (needs 2.6.0 or greater)
librsvg2-common (required for building)

Additional package requirements for Fedora/Redhat -
librsvg2-devel, required for building
gnome-common, required for building
intitool, required for building
gnome-doc-utils, required for building
pytho-reportlab (optional)

canerigal · Posted: Fri 18 Jan 2008, 11:12 Post subject:

Sorry for the long posts, but I've been saving up for a year lol.

I volunteer at a Research Library and do their website. Non profit thing so there is no money of course.

I've told the president of the group about puppy and caneri has loaded it for using on one of her machines and she likes it quite a bit. She would also love to use that os for the Library as we have old machines with Windows 2000 and they are very slow. (and can't afford to buy a windows license) using Puppy would be a great answer for us.

The only holdback with using Puppy are the genealogy programs / database requirements.

Would be great if someone could make a genpuppy Wink

cb88 · Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 1169 Location: USA

hey good to see you finally post! many thanks to eric for teh hostage of mathpup! Smile

...long confuseing posts ....its what I do Smile

no punctuation an absolutely no order or flow....and those LOL ellipses rulz

canerigal · Posted: Fri 18 Jan 2008, 20:10 Post subject:

@cb88

Yes, I agree

davids45 · Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 1159 Location: Chatswood, NSW

G'day Fellow Fogies,

And lovers of long posts.

Thanks for the feed-back on the continued difficulties of finding a comprehensive genealogical program that would run with Puppy.

Or a popular Windows program to run under Wine on Puppy, with no more risk than running this program normally under your chosen Windows flavour.

With each new Wine version put out, I try to get firstly this latest Wine to work with my Puppies, ..........................

then if successful........................

see if I get any further with loading up Legacy (my chosen Gen. program). Continues to fail just when I think it's going to start up. Oh well, back to XP, like everyone else.

PAF5 worked OK for me too, as far as I took it. But for me, PAF5 is a bit boring, limited and cumbersome compared to Legacy. Just the devil I know, I suppose.

The Linux native, ftree, takes a Legacy gedcom with several thousand families but just doesn't appeal in features, or work the way I'm used to with Legacy. So no good as my main life-storing program.

Roots Magic is very close to working completely under Wine and is stylistically close to Legacy, and runs with my full Legacy data import. But I just can't commit to changing over.

Still need to try her-indoors's TMG with Wine. Not my cup-of-tea really though (TMG, I mean.)

Given all this difficulty, I have begun to think that I should try to set up Virtual Box or VMPlayer and see how Legacy runs in XP as a Puppy virtual machine. I started with Puppy on a retired 1996 HP in the attic just for something to do while my GB-RAMmed, hyper-threading and dual core XP machines did my daily stuff. But Puppy became contagious and escaped from the loft so now it's only genealogy that really keeps XP afloat (and once I sort out how Puppy has to work the various tv cards in these computers).

But I thought that data could not be written to a storage device by a virtual machine so a virtual Legacy (or FTM or Roots Magic) would not be much use beyond a bit of learning how things work.

So can I ask the wider pack who happen to read this thread, if this virtual machine in Puppy is feasible, for a data collection and processing activity like genealogy? We need our hard disk access.

David S.