Linux Set up of Lenovo T480 laptop

lesdelc

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I finally received my Lenovo T480 laptop. I believed the laptop was coming from Lenovo Canada in Markham, Ontario. I was surprized it came from China. It touched down in three major USA cities and 3 Canadian cities before reaching my front door. However, I was impressed with the quality of the product. Excellent keyboard and display.

I installed Manjaro Cinnamom without any problems. I did have difficulty with getting the laptop to boot off the USB stick. It took me a while to disable to the uefi boot only and get the legacy & uefi boot sequence in place. After hunting around in the bios I finally got the correct settings.

I discovered yaourt was not being developed and found yay to setup my printer and the ttf-ms-fonts. Everything is running great off of Manjario. At last I have a dedicated laptop for Linux. I am making the slow transition from Windows to Linux. Biggest hurdle is my software I use for research. Nothing available in Linux.

So far everything is running great!
 
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My research work is genealogy. I use RootsMagic which is a commercial program that is set up to access Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. I have not tried to set up RootsMagic with Wine or PlayOnLinux. I tried Gramps to handle the databases however, it has a long to go before it comes close to commercial software. I have 20 years of research work in RootsMagic & several PowerPoints. I use PPT to give presentations. LibreOffice handles this part without any problems.

I now have two laptops & one desktop on Linux. What remains is two laptops and one desktop with Win10. As you can see my transition is slow from Windows to Linux. I been using Linux since the late 1990s and find it easier to maintain then Windows.
 
I use the latest RootsMagic (7.5.9) with the latest stable Wine (4.0.1) in Linux Mint 19.1. It has worked well for me with few, if any, hiccups. But RM8 is coming out this year, and I have no idea if it will also be compatible.

Cheers
 
I use the latest RootsMagic (7.5.9) with the latest stable Wine (4.0.1) in Linux Mint 19.1. It has worked well for me with few, if any, hiccups. But RM8 is coming out this year, and I have no idea if it will also be compatible.

Cheers

Can you help me set up RootsMagic with Wine? My wife is running Linux Mint 19.1 on her laptop. I choose Manjaro since I am a Arch linux die hard. I will see if Manjaro has Wine installed. It is appreciated if you help me.
 
Can you help me set up RootsMagic with Wine? My wife is running Linux Mint 19.1 on her laptop.
Carefully follow each step here to setup Wine, just like Ubuntu.
1. Add i386 architecture
2. Download and add repository key (2 steps here)
3. Add the repository (choose Ubuntu 18.04/Mint 19.x)
4. Update
5. Add the stable branch

6. Copy your RM7Setup.exe file to Linux Mint, right-click on that file and tell it to open with Wine.

It really should be that simple. Hopefully @arochester's link for Arch will work for you too. Good luck!

Cheers
 
I have been busy setting up my new laptop with Manjaro - Cinnamon. My apologies for the late reply. Some features worked with RootsMagic worked but others did not. I use the Ancestry feature with RM but it did not work under Wine plus a few other features I am addicted to. I will keep Win10 on a desktop. I will play around with Gramps. A GEDCOM import from RM messes up my 80 pages of sources. So it makes it difficult to be totally switched over to Linux.
 
Maybe you should have dual-booted so you could choose between Windows and Linux?
 
I tried dual booting & did not like it. I prefer a computer that is dedicated to an operating system. Having a desktop for Win10 suits my needs. Linux has come a long way since I was using it in the 1990s. Today, I like the GUI (gnome) but still, use the command line for installing packages and updates i.e. pacman.
 
Some features worked with RootsMagic worked but others did not. I use the Ancestry feature with RM but it did not work under Wine plus a few other features I am addicted to.
Can you be more specific? I have not found any feature that does not work in RM, including Ancestry TreeShare. But I don't use the full extent of RM's capabilities, so maybe I just haven't run into the issues that you are having.

A GEDCOM import from RM messes up my 80 pages of sources.
In Gramps or RM? If using RM in Linux, make a RM backup from your Windows (not a GEDCOM) and then restore the backup in your Linux copy. Because of the different file structure in Linux, it may lose track of where the media files are, but that it a simple fix that corrects all the media at once and just takes a couple of minutes.


I've only briefly tried Gramps.... didn't like it.
 
Great advice. This makes sense. I will try it and let you know how I do.
 
Carefully follow each step here to setup Wine, just like Ubuntu.
1. Add i386 architecture
2. Download and add repository key (2 steps here)
3. Add the repository (choose Ubuntu 18.04/Mint 19.x)
4. Update
5. Add the stable branch

6. Copy your RM7Setup.exe file to Linux Mint, right-click on that file and tell it to open with Wine.

It really should be that simple. Hopefully @arochester's link for Arch will work for you too. Good luck!

Cheers

I decided to keep one laptop for Win10 and the LenovoT480 for Manjaro. No problems with the Lenovo T480 or Manjaro. To give Gramps a chance I loaded it on Manjaro and played around with it for a week. After the GEDCOM import to Gramps, it took me a while to clean up the database. The process is a little different when adding people & sources. RootsMagic has great reporting. Gramps is not bad. I can now take my genealogy with me when doing research and attending conferences.
 
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