Installing Family Search Indexing on Ubuntu 14.04 (64bit)

[kalavic]

You made my day! Thank you so much for the information. I used to index, but then my daughter broke my Windows and now I have only Ubuntu and I hadn't been indexing for a long time. There wasn't easy to follow information on indexing web site how to install in on ubuntu. For some reason I didn;t thing googling it until today! People, you rock! Thank you so much! I'm from Russia by they way, in case you'd be happy to know that Russian lds Index, use Ubuntu and you helped someone from Russia other side of the globe for you probably

[jozefos]

On Ubuntu 14.04, unsure which desktop env I've got, but I'm having a few issues here. When I ran the shell script it said it couldn't display the GUI because it needed access to an X server so I ran the installer in the shell instead, appeared to be successful but when I search for the FamilySearch indexing program and click on it, nothing happens. I've tried running it from the search bar about three times and I can't find any likely suspects in the pid list, although it does say a GNOME process is running, so I'm guessing that's the flavour of my desktop env.

Anyone got any ideas?

[marianomarini]

On Ubuntu 14.04, unsure which desktop env I've got, ....

Type "echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" (w/o quotes) and you get your desk env.
Then let us know.

[jozefos]

Great thanks, it's Unity then. I'm none the wiser after a few Google searches on Ubuntu, Unity and X server so I'd really appreciate any help, as it will hopefully enhance my knowledge of Linux too

[marianomarini]

When I ran the shell script it said it couldn't display the GUI because it needed access to an X server so I ran the installer in the shell instead, ...

I don't understand, sorry but my English is really poor. Have you problem running the "installer script" or "program script"?

[jozefos]

Sorry, I probably wasn't very clear - I do better with bullet points

[*] I saved the script which is on the familysearch site at the install stage, "Indexing_unix.sh".
[*] When I ran it I saw this message:

Could not display the GUI. This application needs access to an X Server.
*******************************************************************
You can also run this application in console mode without
access to an X server by passing the argument -c
*******************************************************************

[*] So from my Downloads directory I ran "./Indexing_unix.sh -c" and the install process appeared to work - the output in the shell was very similar to when you install something using apt-get and I now have a desktop icon with the following properties:

"Allow executing file as program" is ticked
Command is set to '/bin/sh "/home/joseph/.FamilySearchIndexing/indexing.familysearch.org/indexing"'

[*] However, when I double click that icon nothing happens. It doesn't appear to start any processes and no programs appear in my launcher bar. When I navigate to that directory in the shell and run ./indexing, again nothing useful happens - it pauses momentarily and then displays the prompt again, like so:

joseph@laptop-JG:~/.FamilySearchIndexing/indexing.familysearch.org$ ./indexing <------------------------------ No program launches at this point
joseph@laptop-JG:~/.FamilySearchIndexing/indexing.familysearch.org$

I wonder whether it is X server related because if the installer GUI needs X server and can't have it then perhaps the program itself needs X server and can't have it.

[marianomarini]

Are you familiar with shell script?
I looked at "indexing" shell script but find nothing significant.

[jozefos]

I haven't really looked at it, I've only done a little bit of shell scripting, and I only needed a brief look at Indexing_unix.sh to realise I had no idea what was going on.

Could this have to do with the .jar files in the bin folder not having any execute permissions? But then I don't understand what's up with the X Servers. I might just give up for now and wait for the browser-based version, or take a deep breath and boot into Windows and install it there.

[jozefos]

[*] Note it's not the permissions, I did 'chmod 777 *.jar' and it still didn't launch the program

[marianomarini]

[*] Note it's not the permissions, I did 'chmod 777 *.jar' and it still didn't launch the program

Of course. System will provide you an error message if a script try to execute a program with wrong permissions.
If I have well understood, all seem to work fine (I mean no error message) but you see nothing on the screen even when you launch the program. It's right?