jensen Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I have been playing online poker for quite some time now and I noticed that I recently started playing more and more. I think I went from one or two hours per month to around one hour per day. I also never cared much about my plays. Did I play a lot, did I win a lot, what were my chances when I played certain hands. Across many forums people post advanced graphs of their hands and overall progress so I set out to find something similar. Wine has come far, yet certain Windows applications still cause a lot of problems.

I opted to use PokerTracker. It was recommended by me and has a free 60 day trial. The installation of PokerTracker was easy. Much like any normal Windows application. Troubles came afterwards.

PokerTracker uses a PostgreSQL database to store all the information about your hands. After an hour of trying to install the Windows version of PostgreSQL without any success I gave up and attempted to install PostgreSQL on my Ubuntu installation. Installing stuff on Ubuntu is fairly easy:

$ sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-contrib pgadmin3

Done. All I needed to do was set some passwords and PostgreSQL was finished. (Make sure to replace the word mynewpassword with your new password.)

$ sudo su postgres -c psql template1
template1=# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'mynewpassword';
template1=# \q

After I changed the password for within the database I needed to change the password of the Linux postgres user. Easily done as follows:

$ sudo passwd -d postgres
$ sudo su postgres -c passwd

For future usage I also enabled the admin pack.

$ sudo su postgres -c psql < /usr/share/postgresql/8.3/contrib/adminpack.sql

Almost done. The only thing we need is a PostgreSQL ODBC driver which we can download from here. Extract the zip file and install it like any other Windows application using Wine.

The last thing I had to do (found here) was to change some registry settings:

wget http://www.holdemresources.net/hr/linuxpoker/pokertracker/ptrack-reg.txt
regedit ptrack-reg.txt

When I started PokerTracker it asked me to install PostgreSQL. When I clicked the cancel button it asked me for my PostgreSQL database information. I entered my password since I kept everything else to its defaults and of it went.