After a visit to a local LDS Family History Center, where I was
introduced to Genline Family Finder 2.5.3 running under Windows XP on
aging Dell (yuck) hardware, I returned home to see if this application
would run on my workstation of choice for genealogical work (openSUSE
11.1 32 bit/KDE 3.5). The only installers available were exe for
Windows and some kind of Java bastardization for Mac OSX only. Hence, I
downloaded the exe installer, and then went to YaST and installed Wine.
Not finding Wine in any menu, I went to Konsole and found that it
recognized the Wine command, and I surmized that I should CD to the
directory where I had downloaded the Genline installer and issue the
command:
wine GFFinder2_install.exe
This Genline app installed as if it were a Linux app and was in the
Applications folder of my K Menu, from which I put a copy in Favorites.
I run it from there without any explicit call to Wine, so, in effect,
it is a native openSUSE application. Note: it is basically just a web
browser of microfilm images stored in a Swedish database.
I don’t have a problem using this, but I have no basic understanding
concerning why it should work so naturally on my openSUSE workstaion
(better than what I experienced via Windows XP). Therefore, any
insights from openSUSE/Wine gurus would be greatly appreciated.
Bob Carlson