Greetings all...

I recently spent a few days, full days more or less, developing a kick-@ss quotations database in Filemaker Pro 7. There were tables like Author, Source, and Citation, intertwined to give me maximum searching and browsing capability between and among them. Filemaker's "Portals" allowed me to display lists of similar citations, for instance, or citations with the same source or author, etc. I could click on these portal rows and be whisked to the record in question. I had designed it, tweaked it, tested, and began to use it. And as I am about to return to graduate school, I was pretty sure this was like the smartest thing I'd ever done.

But as all this was going on, I was also on a single-minded mission to ditch Windows forever. I was, and remain, convinced that my day-to-day quality of life is better when I don't have to deal with that OS or anything having to do with it.

Unfortunately for me, this means leaving my kick-@ss database behind, and the closer I get to going back to school, the more I am doubting the judgement I made. I've tried installing Filemaker 7, 6, and 5.5 using the latest Wine. No dice. I've tried finding a way to publish the Filemaker database using the internet, or access it using some other means. No dice. Finally I've tried finding a similar program in Linux that I can use to develop a comparable database from scratch. No dice. (I don't think I'm smart enough - Filemaker is really easy).

So my question is this: does anyone know of any way I can resolve this problem short of having to reinstall Windows on my machine (which I really do not want to do because XP has a way of hijacking the box and making it difficult to salvage Suse).

I don't know a thing about Filemaker, but according to their website, it can export databases to (among others) dbase, or comma- or tab-separated text. Either of these formats can be imported into OpenOffice.org's database.

So you would need access to a windows machine on which you can install Filemaker, then open your kick-@ss database and export it to one (or both) of the formats listed above, then transfer that to your linux box and open it in OpenOffice.

I would suggest exporting it in every format that Filemaker will allow, then burning it to CD. That way you'll have the best chance of importing it into whatever database program you feel most comfortable with.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

thanks for the suggestions. my only concern is that all of the form capabilities i've built into the Filemaker DB would be lost in another program. i'm worried that essentially I'll only be able to get to the data (i hadn't entered a whole lot into it anyway). so it's not really the records that i'm trying to salvage, it's the structure tof the DB itself - the relationships and how records can be displayed and interwoven.

but it's good to know that OpenOffice has a DB program. maybe i can build something similar using that.

IIRC, there is a way to make your database live via the web with filemaker pro. its been almost 5 years since i used filemaker, but i belive there is a way to host your data live. that does requrie a M$ system to hose like win2k server, but it is doable.

I have sed Filemaker for awhile too and its ease of creating reports makes it the applications of choice for many of my tasks. Generally speaking any SQL relational database should be capable of searching based on any relationship but they lack the front end. OpenOffice can be a frontend for mysql, postgresql and other ODBC/JDBC SQL databases. I don't know what the extend of its report writing capabilities.

Thanks all. For the time being, I've (ugh) reinstalled Windows on my box so that I can get the most out of this DB. Hopefully, in the near future I'll be able to figure out some sort of workaround, but for now this is OK I guess. My only problem now is that the partition I created for my data (and to be accessible by both OSes) is read-only in Linuz and I can't change the permissions, even in Super-User mode). I'm sure I'll figure it out though.

Thanks again all....

supes

database programs for linux...

well, i think the situation is gradually improving, at least in respect of easy-to-use front ends -

servers - mysql, postgresql, etc.

front ends for above -

openoffice.org. note - i've used this with mysql, connected via odbc. from memory it was a *swine* to set up, and it doesn't sport the sort of nice functionality you might see in, say, ms access

rekall is meant to be very good - i've as yet been unable to get it to compile, which is a bummer...

there's also kexio (i think that's what it's called), but i know nothing about it.

i think you're going to end up having to do a re-design with linux-based programs...