For quite a while, I have been using Family Tree Legends 5 as my main genealogy application to keep track of my family tree, but hit upon a bit a snag recently.
FTL just ceased to stop working, and doing a bit of web searching, discovered that this app does not like running on Windows XP and Vista. I suspect that some Windows update that ran installed something incompatible with FTL.
Well, that prompted me to look to find a new application to use, and after much searching, I settled on GRAMPS, which is a open source solution.
GRAMPS is built using Python, predominantly for Linux, but it also runs in Windows.
Some of the best features of GRAMPS is that it it supports plugins, so if it does not have a feature that you want in it, you can find a plugin for it, or if you are so inclined, you can write one yourself.
To be honest, capturing data is a bit slower than what I was used to in Family Tree Legends, but the other features in the application, such as the tree views more than make up for this.
Installing it in Windows was a bit of a hit and miss affair for me. It requires Python, and a few other dependencies to be installed before it will work. Despite what the GRAMPS 3.2.5 installer claims, I found that it needed specific versions of these dependencies to work.
These are:
- python-2.6.6
- gtk2-runtime-2.16.6
- pycairo-1.4.12-2.win32-py2.6
- pygobject-2.20.0.win32-py2.6
- pygtk-2.16.0.win32-py2.6
I am sure it is possible to get other combinations of these libraries to work, but that would amount to much trial and error.
Once I got it up an running, it has worked like a charm, and I am pretty certain I will be sticking with GRAMPS for quite a while.
