GnuCash 1.9.0 Released 221
Grendel Drago writes "The GnuCash team have released GnuCash 1.9.0.
After literally years of waiting, GnuCash is now a GTK2 application. The current version is unstable, and testers are needed."
You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi.
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Finally...software that is a perfect fit for my finances.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Finally (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!", the first of several unstable 1.9.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series, and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Informative)
Clearly, you're a moron.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Finally (Score:2)
Re:Finally (Score:2)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Funny)
Just what I needed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just what I needed (Score:2)
It's in BETA. As in use at your own risk, capiche?
Re:Just what I needed (Score:3, Interesting)
My Dad loved to use that word when he was yelling at me. It took me years to verify that he meant "understand".
Re:Just what I needed (Score:3, Informative)
Since it's Italian, it's capice.
It's capisce, third person (singular) of the verb capire (to understand) with the imperative form in a question (capisce, lei? == do you understand?).
It's pronounced in english as ka-pee-sh, but in italian the final e is not muted, so it's pronounced like ka-pee-sh-e.
Re:Just what I needed (Score:2)
Re:Just what I needed (Score:2)
"Software that works" works because it has a development and a QA team. Open source doesn't always have the luxury of both being totally dedicated teams. My point was that if you're going to take the time to complain about it, do something about it! Help the project, *or*, go spend money on Quicken, Moneydance, Microsoft Money, etc and use them. There's nothing remotely productive or constructive abou
Re:Just what I needed (Score:3, Funny)
"Let the *other guys* do all the work and just give me the final product."
In fact, why don't we just send them all over to your place to enter your transactions and then balance them for you?
Guess what? It's strictly optional. YOU don't have to lift a damned finger if you don't want. *I* am going to download it tonight and give it a go because I want to.
I consult fixing other people's computers - solving their software problems. Guess what? I'm good at what I do. I'm good
With a web browser (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:With a web browser (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course in MS Money it was worse, considering the browser is IE-based, and therefore shares the security holes... Might as well just mass-mail your financial details...
Re:With a web browser (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just what I needed (Score:3, Insightful)
So here is YOUR chance to save the world from buggey unstable money managment. Download it, and send it well written reports of any bugs you find.
Re:Just what I needed (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like MS Money! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just what I needed (Score:2)
Re:Just what I needed (Score:2)
Years of waiting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Years of waiting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Years of waiting... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Years of waiting... (Score:2)
Re:Years of waiting... (Score:2)
I hope so. And then xmms will be rewritted.
Re:Ever heard of a static compile? (Score:3, Interesting)
While the overall dependecy profile of gnucash is large, it's really not that large; but it certainly sits very high up on the desktop application stack, so there's a lot of depth below it. In any case, the dependencies are there for two reasons: it's a comparativ
FINALLY! (Score:5, Informative)
It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.
Oh, and speaking of which--y'all know that you can file your taxes for free [irs.gov], right? Or at least 70% of Americans can. Down from 100% last year, but still something.
W
Re:FINALLY! (Score:5, Informative)
Courtasy of the always great LWN [lwn.net]. They are from September of last year.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
What do you mean by "Spoofs?" I know the author put considerable effort into making it familiar for quicken users, but everything you see is pure Java code written by the author himself. I spoke with him on several occasions, and even managed to finagle a special version with plugin support out of him. Unfortunately, I never completed the project I wanted it for. (Creating a WAP i
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Informative)
It's my understanding that Moneydance can appear to banks as if it were Windows Quicken, when really it's Moneydance running on a Mac, or whatever.
If I'm wrong about this, someone correct me, because this is an important feature that I'd kinda need for my bank...
W
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
Not to get in a terminology debate here, but "compatible with quicken" to me would suggest that files could be exchanged between Moneydance and Quicken, which I actually think is the case..
What I'm talking about is a compatibility with the banks, who think they have a connection with Windows Quicken when it is actually Moneydance identifying itself as such and acting identically. This is much the same way Firefox can identify itself to a server as Internet Exp
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
Financial programs (Score:2)
Re:Financial programs (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
Re:FINALLY! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
Re:FINALLY! (Score:2)
Ask Bill (Score:3, Funny)
I Am Really Interested In Looking This Over (Score:5, Informative)
The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!", the first of several unstable 1.9.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series, and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.
What's New in GnuCash 1.9.0?
o Welcome to GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!" the first of several unstable releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down bugs.
o WARNING WARNING WARNING - Make sure you make backups of any files used in testing versions of GnuCash in the 1.9.x series. Although the developers go to great lengths to ensure that no data will be lost we cannot guarentee that your data will not be affected if for some reason GnuCash crashes in testing these releases.
o PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Gn uCash [gnome.org]
o If you have the urge to help beyond testing please get involved in the discussions on the GnuCash mailing lists which you will find at http://www.gnucash.org./ [www.gnucash.org] We especially need people to help with updating the documentation as all texts refer currently to the 1.8.x series. Please see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development [gnucash.org] on how to get involved.
o PS I'm not going to list the many features changed or updated in this release because obviously there is so much that has changed.
Caveats
Caveats for testers:
* Any 1.9.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime. If you test some serious work in a 1.9.x release, make sure you hit "Save" after ever non-trivial workstep.
* Keep in mind that features which are not used in everyday work might crash unexpectedly at all times. This includes but is not limited to: graphical reports, scheduled transaction editor, price editor, financial calculator, OFX/QIF/HBCI import.
* Especially all the new features might crash instantly on testing. This applies in particular to any of the budget-related features. We may always decide to disable such new features for the initial 2.0.0 release, and re-enable them in a later release.
* The documentation is completely outdated. All help texts usually only refer to the 1.8.x series; please expect all descriptions in the help texts to be totally wrong when applied to the upcoming 1.9.x series. Everyone is invited to help improve the documentation; see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development [gnucash.org] on how to get involved.
How can you help?
* Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there. Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Gn uCash [gnome.org]
* Translating: The new release comes with plenty of new translation strings. If you consider contributing a translation, we invite you to test this release already, but please keep in mind that we are not yet in our string freeze phase. Please check http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status [gnucash.org] for updates on this, as we recommend to wait for the string
Re:I Am Really Interested In Looking This Over (Score:3, Informative)
Like what? I was eagerly awaiting this release, mainly because GTK1 sucks on OS X (no umlauts in my experience). So far, the only changes I noticed (besides the GTK2 switch) is budgeting and closing of a financial year, both of which I haven't tried so far. Plus a dubious UI change by presenting account windows as tabs and not as real windows, meaning you can only see one
NOOOOoooo, etc. (Score:2)
Re:NOOOOoooo, etc. (Score:2)
Re:I Am Really Interested In Looking This Over (Score:2, Informative)
simple.
or Window->new window with page
even simpler.
This is a huge, extremely complicated project being developed by a literal handful of volunteers. Give them some credit
GnuCrash? (Score:2, Funny)
GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2, Interesting)
With this news, it looks like a port might finally be reachable. This may be the next great OSS app that I can show off to friends and family, and I'll be able to use it on my Windows laptop. Here's to the GNUCash team for all th
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2, Informative)
Although more suited to business, you may want to check out sql-ledger. It's multi-platform capable, free as in beer, and in every way an equal to Quickbooks:
http://www.sql-ledger.org/ [sql-ledger.org]
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2)
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2)
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2)
What you are missing is that Gnucash 1.9.x. uses more than the gtk2 toolkit. It explicitly access gnome functions and uses Gnome components like GConf. And don't forget either that some components like gtkhtml are actually part of Gnome 2 now.
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2)
But all of GTK2 and most of GNOME has already been ported to windows anyway. You can get prebuilt binaries for most of the libraries at: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/platform/2.12/2.12.0
I'm not sure how many extraneous libraries GnuCash 1.9 relies on... but if all the libraries already have windows ports, it's really easy. As an example, the last GTK2 app I ported to windows took about 30 minutes of time.
And the native MacOSX GTK2 port seem
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's anything like the 1.8 version, it relies on at piles of esoteric packages [gnucash.org]. Why this program has significant portions written in scheme (of all things!), I will never understand.
I use the program, but it requires extraordinary care and maintenance. There was an issue with debian package dependencies sometime last year which completely broke gnucash for weeks. It's simply poor software design. Now I run it within a vmware player image which never gets updated, so I can be sure that it'll start tomorrow.
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere? (Score:2)
Special Computer (Score:4, Funny)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/01/14182
KMyMoney (Score:5, Informative)
Now, I have nothing bad to say about GnuCash. It's a good program and served me well when I used it. I only mention KMyMoney as an alternative worth considering.
I know *exactly* what you mean. (Score:3, Funny)
Truth be told, their motto is proof: "Through rain, sleet, snow, or dark of night: BitchBetterHaveMyMoney."
Re:KMyMoney (Score:2)
I gave up waiting and switched to KMyMoney
I hope it didn't actually K your money.
Re:KMyMoney (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?
Don't be a jackass. No reasonable size application is written from scratch anymore. The KMyMoney folks decided to use the KDE framework, just like the GnuCash group used all the "Gnome cruft" instead. If you want something totally minimal, perhaps I could introduce you to vi, bc, and grep. Wait - scratch that - bc depends on ncurses and readline. It may not be "pure" enough for someone of your discriminating tastes.
Re:KMyMoney (Score:2, Interesting)
You have something of a point -- but when the developers themselves [gnucash.org] explicitly use words like "nightmare" and "even with apt-get, some packages may still need to be installed manually", re-use has definitely been taken too far.
Woohoo! (Score:3, Informative)
Horray!! Thank you, GNUCash team!!
The Kot (Score:5, Interesting)
In plain English, this means if you know only your little backyard, then there is just US. Otherwise your world may include Germany, and the rest is, of course, US. Now, some people may find this funny. Others might cry. I am just confused. How can they write such code? It should read if Germany
The last time I put numbers like the shown 5 into code was almost three decades ago in a Basic program. I have seen much better GNU software and hope someone removes the word GNU from this project's name.
No offense, but I thought financial planning software should comply with higher standards.
Re:The Kot (Score:4, Informative)
So, what's German tax information doing in there? Let's look a little further into the file where this exact same technique is repeated in another function... This is a very simple hack that loads the (new, special) German tax definition file in a German locale, or (default) loads the previous US tax file. */
A clear answer: this is a hack not really intended for general consumption. I'm guessing someone is experimenting with integrating the German data, but it isn't quite ready yet. LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX may be a "this is under development and will hopefully eventually work, but not now" setting. Little unused hackery and experiments live in most mainstream code, commented or #ifdefed out. It's fairly common in proprietary software because the end user has little to no chance of learning that they're there.
It looks like this little hack is present, if no enabled, in the trunk of their repository. That's not good and it should probably be removed (or marked more clearly so it doesn't accidentally ship). But it's hardly a Major Problem.
Re:The Kot (Score:2)
Not happy with any of them (Score:3, Interesting)
Tried with:
GnuCash
Quicken
and now with MS Money
None of them really do what i want.
GnuCash had double entry accounting which i think is just much to manage for my personal finances. Support to import transaction was incomplete back then (only QIF format worked, and QIF is a PoS). Now it seems that they improved on that but still the double entry system makes me nervous.
Quicken is a buggy, ad invested piece of software. Whenever you click on a "function" you're send to some third party website. Their move to not allow import of QIF for certain types of accounts gave me the rest and i quit.
Money is not as ad invested, but buggy as well. But right know i still kinda like it, except that some general functionalities are missing that i really would like to see in the future.
What's missing in all of these PFM's is that they don't take stupid work away from me, they should help me, not give me more work than necessary.
Example: My Payee information that i download in the transactions of the banks looks like encrypted bullocks to me. There has to be a way to name these things in user friendly way.
The automatic categorization of transaction lacks functionality as well. It should be possible to define rules. Like: i went to Safeway at noon on a weekday -> Lunch Category, otherwise Groceries
Furthermore i like to have the whole thing setup as a service on my computer, it wouldn't take too much... The service would then automatically log into my bank accounts everyday and download latest transactions. Maybe even sent me an e-mail or text message that i should maybe not use credit card XYZ anymore, because i'm about to bounce the credit limit.
There is more and i just wish i could see any sort of progress in their yearly releases, but i've given up on that.
Re:Not happy with any of them (Score:2)
GnuCash had double entry accounting which i think is just much to manage for my personal finances.
That's what you think now. Then your demands change, perhaps you want to maintain a small business. Double entry accounting (which GnuCash can also do in the background) is the right way to handle things.
I don't get it, people! (Score:2, Insightful)
I've learned so much about finances with GNUCash it's amazing - much more, I'm sure, than using some other program. The layout is very LOGICAL - maybe not the e
Re:I don't get it, people! (Score:2)
Re:I don't get it, people! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If cross platform is important. (Score:2)
Whatever computer you run it on stores enough info in your home directory so it automatically opens your account file from the stick too of course. Good news is that it can import GNUCash files.
Projects like gaim have taken gtk2 based apps and po
Web Version (Score:2, Interesting)
I would pay a monthly fee for a standards compliant web based version of Quicken.
I use GnuCash (Score:2)
I waited for THIS? (Score:2)
Hell, not even Microsoft can do it that bad. This sucks.
Mac binaries? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I know you can install GnuCash using Fink, as that's what I do currently. But it would be so much more convenient to be able to download a standalone GnuCash.app like you can with Gimp, Frozen Bubble, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and others.
Donating to the Gnucash project (Score:4, Interesting)
Gnucash isn't perfect, but it's got everything I need to keep track of things. I do all my entry manually, although I have imported a few times just testing (I prefer my own formatting and such and don't care which gas station, etc., just that it was a gas station).
I figure if I'd been upgrading Quicken versions, I'd have spent at least $50. Plus, I would like be able to link to a Windows port on my Free GPL Programs [roysdon.net] page which I list all the apps I use that others should check out on Windows.
I decided to donate [sourceforge.net] to the cause. Hopefully others who use Gnucash will consider tipping the developers [sourceforge.net]. I'm sure even $5, especially if it's dozens of folks, will help motivate them.
I wish I had the time to bug-test v1.9, but I don't, so I'll tip a little more
Free, my arse! (Score:4, Informative)
One reply suggested that GnuCash was a viable alternative to quicken. My problem with GnuCash (or really with Quickbooks) was that I couldn't export the accounts from Quickbooks into GnuCash. Well anyway, at the time of the Novell article, we had just hit our year end, so we had P&L and Balance sheets for everything.
So, perfect time to try GnuCash, just resetting everything off the Balance Sheet. Anyway, through this process I discovered that Quickbooks had 'lost' some of my previous VAT payments. Added them all up - £400 for me (don't worry I triple checked - no messing with the tax man). So GnuCash wasn't free for me - they actually paid me to use it. Cheers, GnuCash!
I miss the simple 'VAT Report' from QuickBooks - it's quite tricky in GnuCash. But if it was costing me £400 - I can handle the minor inconvenience.
I'm really looking forward to the 1.9.0 - hopefully, some more of the inconveniences will disappear and maybe the interface will be a little less GTK1.
Quicken 2004 on Crossover (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent about 2 hours talking to an Indian guy over chat who barely spoke English who could not help me. He switched me over to a hispanic girl who spoke even less English at me for another 3 hours. Seriously.. both spoke horrible English. About three-fourths of my effort went to trying to communicate with them. Also, they knew shit about Quicken. It was easy to tell I knew more about it than them - just they were there as 'support' for idiots only or something.
Then, I called in the next day and spoke with person after person for another three hours. Each time, I had to duplicate the problem on my end, reinstall Quicken, duplicate the problem again.. and show them how to duplicate it. They duplicated it and still could not tell me how to fix it. They said they will send it to the development team. That was a month ago.. Hopefully they can fix this before tax season.
Whereas, in open source, if there was a problem like this, I could probby get one of the developers to issue a minor quickfix in a matter of days..
Hopefully there's a way to convert all my current data (about 50 hours of entry worth) into GnuCash's format. I'm definitely willing to give it a try..
Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but..... (Score:2)
Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but..... (Score:2)
Which is why I always trudge down to H&R Block, and sit in front of a Real Person (TM) who not only does the data entry, but can also call over a manager (who might actually be a CPA) if he/she gets in trouble. Also, I get some limited liability coverage (although you are still responsable for having all your forms). Followed by... in all the years I've sent it in through Block, I've never been audited or had the IRS send back a correction (like they did once when I did it myself).
If you want to ris
Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but..... (Score:2)
So ya.. for a normal business, call H&R Block. If you're a financial advisor and have a son willing to do data entry
Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but..... (Score:2, Informative)
I can certainly relate to your experience with Quicken
Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but..... (Score:2)
I wouldn't be in a hurry if I were you. I'm sure GnuCash can import your QIF file from Quicken, but you don't want to use this version of GnuCash since it's an unstable development version. Also, you don't explicitly mention what operating system you're using, but just in case do you realize GnuCash only runs on Linux? As far as I know, anyway. And I get a fu
Re:Where I come from it's called a failure... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where I come from it's called a failure... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Where I come from it's called a failure... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Release" (Score:2)
Re:Buggy financial software? (Score:2)
Re:another great GTK holdover (Score:2)
http://beep-media-player.org/site/BMPx_Homepage [beep-media-player.org]
Re:So... (Score:2)
Re:cool! (Score:2)
A few gripes. (Score:2)
So it's a bit less monumental for us Ubuntu users, alas...
Re:Switched to Monedance last March... (Score:2, Insightful)