I noted that GnuCash had released major new versions since I last tried it (1.8 I think) so I decided to give it a spin on my Ubuntu Linux system. I tried apt-get install and there was on Ubuntu package so I downloaded the source and compiled it. Building it was easy except for installing the bazillion GNOME, Guile, and g-wrap dependencies to satisfy the configure script. In the end, it worked and I did a sudo make install to install it and then tried it out.
It fired up and told me that it couldn’t find configuration data, but it could fix the problem by adding some directories to my .gconf.path file, which I had it do. But then it crashed with:
: In procedure scm-error in expression (scm-error (quote misc-error) #f ...): : no code for module (g-wrap gw standard)
I tried to run it again and it displays the splash screen for a second but then I get the same error.
After digging around in the forums, I found the solution here.
After doing sudo apt-get install guile-g-wrap, things ran nicely. This apparently is not a GnuCash bug, but an Ubuntu bug because they’ve split the dev and runtime packages for g-wrap, but didn’t make the dev package depend on the runtime package. Hope the Ubuntu guys address that.
Later on I’ll try to find my old GnuCash data files, if I still have them, and play around with the new version a bit more.
Perhaps, I’ll also take a stab at creating a .deb for Ubuntu, which I’ve never done before. It would be nice to create a .deb and put it in a Dapper repository.
gnucash is really moving in a positive direction. I’ve played with a great deal during its embryonic glibc 1.4 days. Only thing that would make it a killer app, is sync w/my palm apps. I do think there is a project underway to achieve this end.