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FTree is an X-windows program to store and display family tree genealogy information.

FTree has been designed to run under Linux (Intel platform) and has been built with the Xforms GUI tools.

Latest version is: 2.1, Thu 22 Sep 2016 00:29

Major features

FTree History

I started working on FTree towards the end of the last century. The first version was command line only and ran on OS9. It then got ported to Linux. The OS9 version was never released. There is not, and never has been a MS-Windows version.

There was a lot of development up to around 2005 and then it got parked because of other projects and commitments. I have always supported it and provided occasional bug fixes and special features for people through the years but there has not been much new development.

Recently a few people have been having trouble with the old packages so I decided that since it was still being used (and I use it myself) I should at least refresh the build system to produce some more up-to-date packages. Not much has changed in the code, though I do plan to sort a few things out, so if you do try one of the new builds I would like to hear from you.

Interoperability

The latest build of FTree should run on most current Linux platforms. The download page has various packages including 32 and 64 bit options. In the past I produced fully statically linked builds, however with modern libraries thats too hard. See the download page for detail of exactly what is required. The requirements are minimal and you should not need to install any special packages (you don't need to install Xforms).

FTree uses the GEDCOM data format to store information because it is simple, ASCII, flexible and it makes it possible to interchange data with many other genealogy programs on other platforms.

In practice that means you can probably read much of your existing data and will be able to take data from FTree to use in another package. FTree does fairly well with many GEDCOM files from other systems. (see the current supported tag list and the FAQ section on compatibility for more information). The biggest file I've got is about 8000 people it works well. I have heard from other users they have files that are quite a lot larger.

GEDCOM is very comprehensive and there are some GEDCOM tags that are preserved but not (yet) available in the GUI. There are some GEDCOM features that FTree doesn't yet support at all but FTree is getting better at telling you about what it doesn't understand.
Occasionally files turn up that FTree completely fails to handle. If you have one, please let me know so I can fix it!


Acknowledgements

FTree uses the IJG JPEG libraries, http://ijg.org
FTree uses the XFORMS GUI toolkit libraries, http://xforms-toolkit.org/
FTree uses the GEDCOM file format.

Other software and links..


Last modified: 22nd September 2016
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