software for linux

I have 2 related questions.

1) How important is your choice of Genealogy Software?

Charlie Hoffpauir...

It depends on "which" program you start with and "which" program you
decide to switch to. Some are much better at importing data from some
programs....there's no universal "best one in my opinion, although
RootsMagic and TMG both do a pretty good job of importing. In general,
if you start with a "limited" Genealogy program, and switch to a more
full featured one, you won't lose very much. But if you start with a
full featured program and switch to a limited one, you will probably
find that the limited program doesn't include some features that the
other program had, and you lose that information.

In other words, if I made a bad choice, and found
a better program, how hard is to transfer information.

Charlie Hoffpauir...

Not hard, but perhaps frustrating.

If all programs speak "ged" can I just import/export
anytime I like, or will various "good stuff" get lost.

singhals...

Well, all programs speak "ged" the way the US, Canada, Australia, and
England all speak English.

Denis Beauregard...

Mauvais exemple. Au Canada, 25% de la population ne parle pas anglais
;-)

Bad example. In Canada, 25% of the population doesn't speak English
;-)

singhals...

You mean, Quebec won? ;)

Denis Beauregard...

When Quebec will be independent, then you will have English only in
Canada and the example will be correct.

Joe Makowiec...

But New Brunswick is officially bilingual, and there are pockets of
French all around l'Acadie, including l'Université Ste-Anne in Pointe-de-
L'Église.

Denis Beauregard...

There are pockets in Ontario too. But at this time, the next
generation is often switching to English in those pockets. You
can check about the "assimilation rate". Without Quebec, French
will be the 3rd or 4th language in Canada by population. I think
Chinese is already the 2nd (out of Quebec and because of massive
immigration from Hong Kong in 1997).

In one name studies, you have to find those language pockets even
if they are meaningfull only for early migrations.

tehenne...

Kezako ! Is there a particular way of speaking GED as one is
English-speaking or not ? Precision !

Denis Beauregard...

Ils sont dans le champ ! Pour eux, la différence d'accent entre
l'anglais parlé dans ces pays est comme la différence entre les
sortes de formats Gedcom. Pourtant, les Gedcom sont souvent
différents parce qu'il y a des concepts différents dans les bases
de données des logiciels alors que lorsqu'on compare les variations
d'une même langue, on a les mêmes concepts prononcés différemment
ou avec un autre mot.

singhals...

I *knew* Denis saw my point. (g)

As a rule-of-thumb, the more of the specialized nooks'n'crannies you use
in any program, the less will transfer successfully. If you ignore the
media files, the address book, the alternate-parent, the source citation
screens, and the like, and put everything into NOTES or More About or
whatever your program calls it, the more likely everything is to
transfer well.

And I think Gramps is the *ix program of choice. Don't speak it m'self,
though.

Joe User...

Various stuff will get lost. Then you have the problem of loading various
stuff multiple times. That can be a bigger problem.

Charlie Hoffpauir...

You'll not only lose some stuff, but if you don't choose the initial
program well, you might find that some stuff you entered just won't
export correctly to another program. But you can count on "basic" data
transferring OK.

2) What is the best choice of Genealogy Software software
for linux? Alternatively, if someone could point me

David Rowell...

From what I've seen Gramps is THE Linux genealogy program. It has a
very nice user interface and is easy to learn, especially if you aren't
coming to Gramps with a lot of baggage from something else. It imports
and exports gedcom files successfully to PAF and Ancestral Quest
although some of the sources get messed up in import. Gramps is
presently in the process of updating to a new version - I wouldn't wait
tho. Support on the forum has been good and generally from the horse's
mouth.

The Gramps site previously mentioned has a link to d/l a live Ubuntu
6.06 LTS system with Gramps preinstalled. If you don't have Linux
installed I'd recommend it.

As far as Wine is concerned - I have not been able to get ANY good
Windoze genealogy program to run or, sometimes, even install. I really
want to get PAF5.2 running under Wine but haven't yet been able to as of
today. I've tried Ancestral Quest and Legacy - they won't install.
However, Wine is also in the throes of continual update heading toward a
new stable release version.

Herman Viaene...

I use Gramps on Mandriva LE2005, no complaints for Gramps nor Mandriva. I
once tried Suse, but found much less resources for additional programs than
for Mandriva, so I returned to Mandriva.

bugbear...

General question; I started this quest because a relative sent me some
(annotated) photographs.

Now, of course, many of the photographs are group
shots (wedding etcs), are should be "stored" against
each of the people in the photo.

So - do G. program allow
a) storage of multimedia (OK "scans")

Herman Viaene...

In general, yes. But I have not tried every possible file format for
"scans", so .....?

b) multiple references to the sam item; ideally this should
be bi-directional so that the photo has links
to all the people, and the people all have links to the photo.

Actually, thinking on it, this would apply to any
reference material that applies to more than one
person.

Herman Viaene...

In Gramps, you can view/edit Persons and attach imagery in the "Gallery".
You can also view the "Media" and in the properties of each item, there is
a tab "References" where the occurences of this item are listed.

bugbear...

Sounds ideal. Thank you.

Herman Viaene

David Rowell...

In a word - yes, I believe Gramps supports all those options.

at a linux-centric list, or review site,
I could take it from there.

melsonr...

There have been some good replies to your questions. Let me, though, add my
$0.02 to the discussion.

GRAMPS is a competent program that "speaks" gedcom 5.5. It's not the only
package out there, however:

(1) Older, klunkier, but undergoing some modernization - Lifelines. LL has
probbly the best, most extensible reports of any of the packages, *IX or PC -
if you care to take the time to learn its scripting language, you can customize
your reports to a fare-thee-well.;

(2) FTree -X11-based tree display/data-entry program, speaks standard
gedcom 5.5. Not as full featured as Gramps or lifelines, reports very limited,
and, yet, _I_ kinda like it for ease of use for data entry and tree views;

(3) If you have java runtime installed, check out GenealogyJ. This is written
by a buncha "Europeans" (not meant perjoratively, some of my best friends are
Europeans!), its user-interface is a bit quirky but it does a workmanlike job
for data entry and presentation. I've played with it to some extent and find
it annoying but YMMV.

(4) Again, if you have java runtime, check out GDBI. I'm not absolutely
certain it has a stand-alone mode - what I have installed works in conjunction
with phpGedView. GDBI provides a Brothers Keeper-like user interface, is full
featured and allows access to the LifeLines reports. By linking to phpGedView,
it eliminates the need for its own storage structure but relies, instead, on
that provided by GedView;

(5) phpGedView - web-based gedcom visualization; newest version uses one of
several RDBMS (MySQL, Postgres, SQL-Lite, etc) for data storage; on *IX systems
allows multi-user, collaborative work, information sharing; speaks gedcom 5.5;
fair number of useful reports, multiple ways ov viewing data. This and the
very similar TNG (The Next Generation ?) are probably over-kill if you're just
starting, although pGV + GDBI is arguably the best way to go for ease of data
entry, flexibility, range of reports available.

I have played around with all the programs listed and use pGV as my main
genealogy application - everybody here has seen my paeans in the past, so I
won't belabor the point. Given that as my 1st choice, I'd put Gramps in 2d
place, FTree in 3d and GenalogyJ in a somewhat distant 4th place. That's MY
take on it - YMMV, as they say, and I'd strongly recommend you give all of
them a look. pGV has a page on sourceforge, with a link to GDBI and GenealogyJ,
you can web-search for FTree, Gramps and LifeLines.

Hope this helps,

Bob Melson

Leif B. Kristensen...

I've built my own genealogy program on Linux with PostgreSQL and PHP. It
wasn't that hard, as I had an excellent starting point in the data

bugbear...

Did you want a challenge, or percieve some massive
lack in Gramps?

Leif B. Kristensen...

I tried Gramps for around half an hour before I decided that it wasn't
my idea of a genealogy program. Having been a TMG user for eight years,
I've grown too accustomed to the concepts of that program to easily
shift to another one. It's like driving in England, on the wrong side
of the road.

Besides, I had most of the presentation part ready three years ago.
Filling in with some registration routines have actually been easy in
comparison.

Hugh Watkins...

can you export / import standad gedcom?

Leif B. Kristensen...

As this so far has been a very personal project, and I've been
transferring the data directly from TMG with some custom routines, I
haven't bothered about GEDCOM routines. But a public application should
of course need some standard import / export routines, and I'd
certainly like to welcome aboard anyone who would want to write a
GEDCOM module for it. I know that there's an excellent Perl module for
exactly this purpose.

The source part of this project is a tree structure, as outlined in the
GDM manuscript, and thus breaks completely with the GEDCOM data model.
In this respect, there's probably no way to escape from a lot of manual
restructuring in case of a transfer from or to another program. That
was also the heaviest part of my transition from TMG, but now I'm very
happy about the hierarchic sources. The rest of the model should be
fairly easy to implement in GEDCOM.

According to standard software development terminology, the project is
still in the "Proof of Concept" stage. But I'd like to take this
opportunity to welcome anyone who thinks that there is a potential for
a public project here, and who'd like to participate, to contact me at
the address leif at solumslekt dot org. In particular, I'd love to hear
from anyone who has some experience with project management in the Open
Source world. I registered a project with Sourceforge for exactly this
purpose over a year ago, but so far it has been unused.

Hugh W

bugbear...

And please accept my apologies; your site expounds
your motivation rather well.

I should have read it before asking.

dumped from The Master Genealogist, my program of choice when I was
running Windows, along with some knowledge of SQL and PHP from the
experience of building my own Web presentation software. I've actually
reused a lot of the codebase from that project.

I've recently committed my third article of the process at my Web site:
.

Joe User...

Gramps is the way to go. See:

For non-GUI use, I understand lifelines was the standard GED-file utility
for many years.

For an overview of a lot of genealogy resources, see this link:

It's not the most up-to-date, but it is useful.

Remember that Linux runs WINE. A lot of small genealogical utilities
were written for the PC, but will run fine on Linux with WINE.

Charlie Hoffpauir...

I'm not qualified to comment on this. However, the choices for Linux
are much more limited than for Windows or even Mac OS.

Charlie Hoffpauir...

In general, programs make it fairly easy to import PAF data (probably
since PAF was one of the popular eary programs). TMG and RootsMagic
make it easy to import Family Tree Maker data, probably since Family
Tree Maker is the most used program by beginners, and so arguably the
most "switched-from" program. But just because FTM data is easily
imported into RM or TMG that that make is a good program to start
with. As a "beginners" program, FTM makes it very easy to be very
sloppy with your data, and that makes it very hard for any program to
import it properly. It much better (IMO) to start with a better
program and learn good techniques early on.
Charlie Hoffpauir
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