Windows installer

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GRAMPS is not designed to run on Microsoft Windows and should be regarded as experimental. Because it has been designed to use the multi-platform toolsets Python and GTK, a few volunteers have created test installer packages that some users report to work without too many obvious issues. But this is not formally tested and you may find GRAMPS behavior on Windows becomes suddenly unstable or subtly compromises your data over a period of time without you noticing. And each new version may have errors different than the one before. So if you choose to use these under Windows please remember:

  • Work with a copy of your main database and keep regular backups in the GRAMPS XML format.
  • Do not recommend it to Windows users as a stable or usable genealogy application.
  • Join the GRAMPS Windows mailing list to share your experiences or if you are a developer able to contribute to a Windows port.

Installation

1. GRAMPS depends on the following software packages, we have had best results by installing the packages in the order below.

2. Re-boot the computer after installing the above dependencies, prior to installing GRAMPS.

3. gramps-2.2.8-1.exe -- (2.8 MB) GRAMPS one-click installer for Windows, with support for 20 languages. Note: The installer often complains that pygtk is not installed. Cancelling and re-running the installer seems to fix this problem.

Additional plugins

There are some features of Gramps that need additional programs to work. There are several different kinds of reports, and the following features need extra configuration.

  • The Relationship Graph reports (both graphical report and gode generator) need an installation of Graphviz. There is a bug in the current stable release, see this example.
  • The Relationship graph can not use PDF as output format unless there is an installation of ghostscript. After installation, if gsview32.exe or gsview32c.exe is in the path, PDF should appear as one of the formats in the graphical Relationship Graph report.
  • Most other text reports need an installation of ReportLab. There is no installer, but try downloading ReportLab_2_1.zip and unpack it in to you python directory. If your python program is in c:\Program\Python25\python.exe and reportlab is unpacked such that the file c:\Program\Python25\reportlab\setup.py exist, then PDF reports may become available in Gramps.

Limitations

At this time, there is no intent to package all the dependencies and the GRAMPS package into one installer. This creates a very complex coordination condition between GRAMPS and these other projects. It also means a single 19 MB download every version change.

There has recently been discussion about trying to install compiled distillations (dynamic link libraries) of these core dependencies to avoid having to install the entire Python and GTK environment, but this work has not yet been completed. More discussion about this and other Windows issues can be found on the email list archive.