I've also had an initial attempt at getting fpdb running under a linux distro just now. Here's a little feedback from that.
I'm running VectorLinux 6.0 - which is some stripped-down but tarted-up version of Slackware 12.1.0 which will run well on less powerful machines but has a little more in the way of creature comforts than Slackware itself. The computer is a generic laptop - dual processor 1.5 years old 1G mem - pretty standard imo.
I read the Install in Ubuntu section (seemed likely to be closer than Gentoo)(??) and modified ad-lib.
I grabbed git from the VL repository (with gslapt) and pulled the free-poker-tools fpdb. No problems. I then installed MySQL with gslapt. I then spent quite a lot of time searching with google for clues on how exactly to get mysql running healthily. (If I'ld looked in the FAQ I would have found some info.)
Eventually key steps included
chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql
and following the info at
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/mysqlroot.htm
This worked in the end. And "Then use the mysql shell.." from the Ubuntu page went smoothly. I copied over the HUD_Config.xml from WinXP and edited the pathnames to be readable under Unix (mounting the windows hh & program directories).
Next I went to
www.slackbuilds.org and downloaded the mysqldb, matplotlib and numpy slackbuilds and the sources from sourceforge and installed them. No problem. (Do numpy before matplotlib.) (I didn't see matplotlib-data & numeric - maybe they are included in mathplotlib, numpy resp - I haven't checked this out yet.)
Then I opened fpdb. Some success and some fail.
Successes:
The main window opens correctly & one can use the gui to select directories.
I bulk imported hhs into the database reasonably successfully. (I have one or two failures, but I'm 99% certain that's bad hhs & nothing to do with fpdb.) The process didn't end gracefully - I seemed to be in some loop - I can find the log if you're interested, so I killed the terminal.
Opening fpdb again the import the process appears to have gone well. I generate and display player & positional stats correctly.
Less successful so far:
I don't see any sign of the HUD appearing on my PokerStars (6max NLHold'Em) table running under wine. However stop/start auto-import give some signs of life - the main window toggles between them.
Graphing complains it can't find numpy and matplotlib - so I can't report back on the many copies problem. I haven't thought about what is actually happening here yet - & it's getting late so maybe tomorrow.
(btw should I really need pylab - the ubuntu page doesn't mention it but I thought I saw it somewhere else?).
Hopefully I can sort these out with some pointers & so it looks (more or less) like another successful linux install.