According to its Freshmeat entry:

Fpdb is a free/open-source tracker/HUD for use with on-line poker. The intent is to make fpdb capable of supporting all games on all sites.

Fpdb currently supports flop games (Hold 'em, Omaha, Omaha hi/low), stud games (7 card stud, Stud 8 and Razz) and draw games (2–7 Lowball single and triple draw, Badugi and 5 card draw).

Cash games are fully supported, and tournament support is improving all the time.

Currently supported sites include PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, the Everleaf network, the Boss Media network and others; see Features for a full list. Additional poker sites can be supported by writing a plugin to parse the site's hand history files. Several additional plugins are under development and in the development tree.

Fpdb provides impressive player statistics to give you the edge in on-line poker.

Fpdb's profit graph: looks like ChazDazzle had a bad weekend!

The Positional Stats are comprehensive to say the least.

Binaries may be available in your repository (called python-fpdb on my Kubuntu system). Source also is available, and it doesn't seem to require any awkward compiling. To get an idea of the library requirements, the documentation noted the following successful package combination for Ubuntu 9.10:

• Python 2.6

• GTK+ 2.18.3

• PyGTK 2.16.0

• matplotlib 0.99.0

• numpy 1.3.0

• sqlite3 2.4.1

• sqlite 3.6.16

• database mysql

Note the SQL dependencies, as they are particularly important. The fpdb wiki's installation section has a very involved section regarding MySQL under Gentoo, so hopefully a combination of the provided Ubuntu and Gentoo instructions will point you in the right direction for your system.

For those running with source, once you have the library requirements out of the way, you either can grab a source tarball or set up a local repository with git. For the git option, enter the command: Garrick, one line below.

$ git clone git://git.assembla.com/free_poker_tools.git

For those wanting to use the source tarball, grab the latest tarball from the Downloads page and extract it. Open a terminal in the new folder, and you should be able to run the program simply by entering:

$ ./run_fpdb.py 

Whereas my Kubuntu binary ran with the command:

$ fpdb 

Before you start using fpdb, you obviously have to play some poker on one of the supported games, building up an account with some dealt hands against other players and whatnot. Once you've done that, you need to locate the local account files for this game so fpdb can find it later.

The best supported commercial site for Linux is PokerStars, as it runs almost perfectly under Wine. As a religious guy, I can't actually play for money, but I can vouch for PokerStars as it does have a "Play Money" mode for people like me. However, the developers did make it clear to me that fpdb is focused on real money games, so play money support isn't well tested but should work for PokerStars' cash games.

Moving back to fpdb, once you have some data ready to go, click on the Import menu and choose Bulk Import. Browse for the file(s) of your poker site below, and choose your game from the Site filter drop-down box. Now, click Bulk Import and wait a moment for your data to be processed.

I can take you through only a few basic steps, but it should be enough to get you started, after which you should pick up things pretty easily. Looking at the graphs first, click on the Viewers menu and choose Graphs. Find your game(s) below, and enter your user ID. Now in the Sites pane, check/uncheck the games you want to display, and choose Refresh Graph at the bottom. If all went well, a profit graph should display in the panel on the right.

This last step really shows you how to use all of the other viewers as well, so feel free to explore the other features to your heart's content—Ring Player Stats, Tourney Stats, Positional Stats, it's all there. And don't feel restricted to your own account either. You also can see the stats of other players, which, when you think of it, is really the whole point of this program!

Ultimately, Free Poker DB will give a genuine edge to any serious on-line poker players, particularly those taking part in tournaments and the like. However, I'd like to end this month on a slightly different note—an unsolicited comment from co-developer "Chaz" on some heart-warming realities of OSS:

I got involved in the project about a year ago after leaving my job as a management consultant in Washington, DC, to start Pokeit. Pokeit is a similar product to fpdb, except it's a Web application and a commercial venture. On the face of it, Pokeit's collaboration with fpdb might seem a bit odd, given that we're trying to charge for something that fpdb gives away for free. In practice, it feels perfectly natural, and really it should. It almost goes without saying that you can't launch a business today without depending on open-source software—whether that be databases, such as MySQL or Postgres, free development tools, languages, add-on modules or niche libraries. Likewise for us, any tools that track and analyze hands of Internet poker require a set of core functionality for reading and storing data. Developing such a core function from scratch would have been a monumental waste of time for us when fpdb already had a two-year head start and strong foundation already built. So instead of going it alone, we decided early on to collaborate with fpdb on developing the codebase in as many ways as it made sense.

Let's hope his example catches on.

Read more at: http://fpdb.wiki.sourceforge.net