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July 10, 2007

Gnucash 2.1.3 - Slackware

Recently finished installing Gnucash on my aging workstation. It does seem that I'll need to update the motherboard and processor in my box. I'm running a very old Asus A7M266-D board with a modded Athlon MP. I long for a dual-core 64bit workstation. My shiny new Acer Aspire 5100 is not dual-core, though it is 64bit.

Well, for those of you who are not familiar GnuCash is probably one of the older, totally free (as in free speech) personal and business finance software packages. It now has been ported over to the win32 platform. It is fully compatible with OFX and HBCI formats. It will also read Quicken (.qif) and M$ Money extensions.

Traditionally, installing GnuCash (and most Gnome pkgs) had been the huge number of dependencies. In the past, I avoided the problems by using FreeRock Gnome, Dropline Gnome and even Gware. All of the aforementioned packages provide a fairly standard means of installing Gnome packages on a Slackware machine.

This time I used Dropline Gnome 2.18.1 beta, so that I could get all of the required Gnome libs. This wiki was helpful. I grabbed Gnucash 2.1.3 tarball, unpacked and installed the pkg.
Please be advised that the odd series is considered unstable (ie 2.1.x) branch.

Below is a summary of the new features as listed from GnuCash project page.

GnuCash 2.1.3 released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.1.3 aka "at last!", the fourth of several unstable 2.1.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.2.0. With this new release series, GnuCash is available on Microsoft Windows for the first time, and it also runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX. This release is intended for developers and testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

DATA FILE NOTICE If you are using Scheduled Transactions, the data file saved by GnuCash 2.1.2 and higher is NOT backward-compatible with GnuCash 2.0 anymore. Please make a safe backup of your 2.0 data before upgrading to 2.1.2.

I have used GnuCash for about four years. The package has vastly improved. They have been using Gnome 2.x libs since GnuCash 1.8.x. Perhaps the only feature that I wish could be added is sync with PDA (ie Palm OS), hence, I could easily transfer the data from my Palm based P-Cash to my desktop (street spending adds up).

It appears that this feature has been on the project roadmap for awhile. Maybe I need to write one? Try it out, it's a good software package.

Posted by AG at July 10, 2007 7:21 AM