gnucash/README

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************ BETA RELEASE ******************
The version 1.1.x series of gnucash are considered BETA development code.
Things mopstly work these days; some things may still be broken. Feel
free to try it. Please report bugs to http://www.gnucash.org/
The last stable, production version was xacc-1.0.18
The next stable, production version will be gnucash-1.2.x
##############################################
GnuCash
-------
GnuCash is a personal finance manager. A check-book like
register GUI allows you to enter and track bank accounts,
stocks, income and even currency trades. The interface is
designed to be simple and easy to use, but is backed with
double-entry accounting principles to ensure balanced books.
Features include:
- An easy-to-use interface. If you can use the
register in the back of your checkbook, you
can use GnuCash. Type directly into the register,
tab between fields, and use quickfill to
automatically complete the transaction.
- Reconcile window with running reconciled
and cleared balances makes reconciliation easy.
- Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios: Track stocks
individually (one per account) or in portfolio
of accounts (a group of accounts that can be
displayed together).
- Multiple Currencies & Currency Trading: Multiple
currencies are supported and can be bought and
sold (traded). Currency movements between accounts
are fully balanced when double-entry is enabled.
(Some aspects of mutiple currency support are not
fully implemented.)
- Quicken File Import: Import Quicken QIF style files.
QIF files are automtically merged to eliminate
duplicate transactions.
- Reports: Display Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss reports,
or print them as HTML.
- Chart of Accounts: A master account can have a hierarchy
of detail accounts underneath it. This allows similar
account types (e.g. Cash, Bank, Stock) to be grouped
into one master account (e.g. Assets).
- Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split
into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and
other compund entries.
- Double Entry: When enabled, every transaction must
debit one account and credit another by an equal amount.
This ensures that the "books balance": that the
difference between income and outflow exactly equals
the sum of all assets, be they bank, cash, stock or other.
- Income/Expense Account Types (Categories):
These serve not only to categorize your cash flow,
but when used properly with the double-entry feature,
these can provide an accurate Profit&Loss statement.
- General Ledger: Multiple accounts can be displayed
in one register window at the same time. This can
ease the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors.
It also provides a convenient way of viewing a
portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions
in that portfolio.
- Written in C, with perl, scheme and tcl support for easy
configuration and extensibility.
Home Page:
----------
http://gnucash.org/
Origianl X-Accountant home page:
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~rclark/xacc
Precomipled binaries:
ftp://ftp.ultra.net/pub/eugene/RPMS/i386/
Development versions:
http://linas.org/linux/xacc/
Important Note:
---------------
Numerous core dumps have been reported when using various
versions of lesstif. Some versions work, others don't.
Lesstif 0.81: works
Lesstif 0.82: broken
Lesstif 0.81: works
Lesstif 0.86.0: works
Lesstif 0.86.5: broken
These core dumps do not occur with RedHat Motif (or other commercial
versions of Motif).
Running:
--------
The binary-only distribution includes two binary files: 'gnucash.bin'
and 'gnucash-static.bin'. The former requires a Motif shared library;
the latter has Motif statically linked in. If you have Motif,
then just run xacc. If you do not have Motif, then copy
'gnucash-static.bin' to 'gnucash.bin'.
You can then start GnuCash at the command-line, with
"gnucash" or "gnucash <filename>", where <filename> is a
GnuCash account file. Sample accounts can be found in
"data" subdirectory. *.dat files are GnuCash accounts that can
opened with the "Open File" menu entry. *.qif files are
Quicken Import Format files that can be opened with the
"Import QIF" menu entry.
Building & Installing:
----------------------
These steps does not apply to binary distributions; only to
source distributions.
Prior to building GnuCash, you will have to obtain and install the following
packages:
SWIG -- available at www.swig.org need 1.1p5 or later ...
guile -- need version 1.3 or later ( or build 1998.08.18 or 1998.09.10 or later) ...
ftp://ftp.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/extra_libs/TAR/guile-core-19980818.tar.gz
guile-core-19980818-1.i386.rpm works
guile from redhat.com/pub/rawhide is reported to have problems ...
Motif or Lesstif --
Lesstif 0.81 works
Lesstif 0.82 broken
Lesstif 0.83 works
Lesstif 0.86.0 is reported to work
Lesstif 0.86.5 crashes.
Lesstif 0.86.9 works ... but some menus come out 2 pixels high.
Commercial Motif seems to work, but beware old libXm's
combined with new glibc's,
XmHTML -- version 1.1.4 or later
http://www.llp.fu-berlin.de/lsoft/F/5/XMHTML.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ripley/XmHTML/XmHTML.html
ftp://ftp.ultra.net/pub/eugene/RPMS/i386/XmHTML-1.1.5-1.i386.rpm
ftp://ftp.ultra.net/pub/eugene/SRPMS/XmHTML-1.1.5-1.src.rpm
libpng -- portable network graphics library
libjpeg -- JPEG image handling library
libz -- comopression library
xpm -- X Pixmap extension
eperl -- embeddedPerl needed for reports
version eperl-2.2.14 works well with perl 5.00404
http://www.engelschall.com/sw/eperl/
ftp://ftp.ultra.net/pub/eugene/RPMS/i386/eperl-2.2.14-1.i386.rpm
Normally, to build and install GnuCash, all you have to do is:
# ./configure
# make
# make install
You can build Motif, Gnome, and Qt versions.
Depending on your make target, you'll produce:
gnucash.motif
gnucash.motif.static
gnucash.gnome
gnucash.gnome.static
gnucash.qt
Whichever one you produce last ends up the target of a local
gnucash.bin symlink, so that you can always run the local ./gnucash
script to see the last flavor that you built. The ./gnucash script
also handles making sure that you're using files from the source dir
rather than an install tree just like the old ./xacc script did.
You'll use "make install" when you want to do a normal FSSTND /usr/ or
/usr/local style install where everything scatters across the
filesystem in foo/gnucash/* directories. You'll use "make
install-opt" when you want a /usr/local/opt/gnucash style install
where everything just installs into local bin, doc, share, etc dirs.
I couldn't think of a better way to handle this, or I would have used
it.
So the two most likely sets of build instructions would be as follows:
For a full system install (gnucash is installed as part of the
system):
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
make motif
make install
For an /opt style install
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt/gnucash
make motif
make install-opt
Examples of other funny configure options:
configure --with-motif=/usr/local/opt/mootif \
--prefix=/usr/local/opt/gnucash \
--with-xmhtml-includes=/home/rlb/XmHTML-1.1.5/include\
--with-xmhtml-libraries=/home/rlb/XmHTML-1.1.5/src
Flag --with-gtk-config. The way gtk phiolosphy goes,
you should *only* specify the config program location and
rely on it to tell you the right CFLAGS and XLIBS values.
Runtime and install destinations are separate. The --prefix
you specify to configure determines where the resulting binary
will look for things at runtime. The prefix you give to make
install (i.e. make prefix=foo install) only determines where the
files are placed. If this location is different from the
configure --prefix value, then gnucash won't work until it's moved
to that location. This feature is mostly useful for package
builders, but it shouldn't hurt anyone else.
Only the location of startup.scm is hardcoded into the
binary, and even that can be overriden with --startup-file on the
command line. The other defaults are now in startup.scm.
path-defaults.h is now gone. The startup file setting is in
gnucash.h, generated from gnucash.h.in.
Status:
-------
As of version 1.0.18:
GnuCash is known to work in the following configs:
Linux 2.x.x -- Intel w/ RedHat Motif
Slackware 3.4 -- Intel w/ Mootif (OSF Motif 2.0.1)
Linux 2.x.x -- Intel w/ Lesstif v0.81
SGI IRIX -- MIPS
IBM AIX 4.1.5 -- RS/6000 http://www-frec.bull.com/
Unixware 7 -- Intel
SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 -- Intel
See http://linas.org/linux/xacc for precompiled binaries for these platforms
GnuCash seems to be having problems with:
Solaris -- Sparc -- won't compile due to va-args in XmHTML
Linux 2.x.x -- Intel w/ Lesstif v0.82
Download Sites:
---------------
All of the precompiled binaries & the latest source versions can be found
at http://linas.org/linux/xacc However, it is recommended that the master
sites for each particular binary be used instead, for two reasons:
1) bandwidth
2) OS-specific info & support
IBM AIX 4.1.5
-- SMIT-installable images
http://www.bull.de/pub/
see also http://www-frec.bull.com/
SCO OpenServer 5.0.4
http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/x11/apps/xacc/VOLS.tar
Unixware 7
-- use pkgadd to install
http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/x11/apps/xacc/xacc.pkg.gz
SGI Irix
-- in SGI install format
-- warning, this is a very down-level version
http://linas.org/linux/xacc/xacc-1.0b7-sgi-irix.inst.tar
Linux Debian
-- use debian tools to install
http://linas.org/linux/xacc/xacc_1.0.15-1_i386.deb
That's all folks!
Getting Source with CVS
-----------------------
A read-only version of the cvs tree is available on the net.
To access it, first, login, as so:
cvs -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot login
The password is "guest"
To get a copy of the source, do a
cvs -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout xacc
Main Developers:
----------------
Robin Clark <rclark@hmc.edu> wrote the original X-Accountant in Motif
as a school project, taking it to version 0.9 by October 1997.
Linas Vepstas <linas@linas.org> liked what he saw: the GUI was slick,
the code was documented and well structured, and it was all GPL'ed.
And so he re-wrote it: adding cell-widgets to XbaeMatrix, so that
the combobox and arrows would make an even slicker GUI, rewrote the
X-Accountant internals to add double-entry, an account heirarchy,
split out a transaction mini-engine, add support for stocks, and spiff
up the help menus. This was version 1.0 as of January 1998. Since
then, for version 1.1, the engine was expanded & refined, and the
register window code completely redesigned and made mostly
Motif-(and GUI-)independent. Did some prototype OFX work.
Jeremy Collins <linux@cyberramp.net> publicized the GnoMoney project
widely and broadly, and then changed its name to GnuCash. Jeremy
created the gnucash.org web site, registered the domain, got the
initial GTK/gnome code working.
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> abused everyone for not using perl,
and then added guile/scheme support. Rob maintains the build
infrastructure, is handling the whole guile/perl extension language
thing, and is dealing with configuration & configurability.
Fixes & Patches:
----------------
Fred Baube <fred@moremagic.com> for attempted Java port/MoneyDance
Christopher B. Browne <cbbrowne@hex.net> for perl stock scripts
George Chen <georgec@sco.com> for MS-Money QIF's & fixes
Jeremey Collins <linux@cyberramp.net> for GnoMoney & GTK port
Ciaran Deignan <Ciaran.Deignan@bull.net> for AIX binary version
Tyson Dowd <tyson@tyse.net> for config/make patches & debian maint.
Koen D'Hondt <ripley@xs4all.nl> for Solaris patches to XmHTML
Bob Drzyzgula <bob@mostly.com> for budgeting design notes
Dave Freese <DFreese@osc.uscg.mil> for leap-year fix
Otto Hammersmith <otto@bug.redhat.com> for RedHat RPM version
Jon K}re Hellan <jk@isdn-a33.itea.ntnu.no> misc core dump fixes
Tom Kludy <tkludy@csd.sgi.com> for SGI Irix port
Ted Lemon <mellon@andare.fugue.com> for NetBSD port
Yannick Le Ny <y-le-ny@ifrance.com> pour la traduction du readme en francais
G. Allen Morris III <gam3@ann.softgams.com> for QIF core dump
Peter Norton <spacey@inch.com> for a valiant attempt at a GTK port
OmNiBuS <webmaster@obsidian.uia.net> web site graphics & content
Myroslav Opyr <mopyr@IPM.Lviv.UA> for misc patches
Alain Peyrat <Alain.Peyrat@nmu.alcatel.fr> for configure.in patches
Gavin Porter <maufk@csv.warwick.ac.uk> for euro style dates
Ron Record <rr@sco.com> for SCO Unixware & OpenServer binaries
Dirk Schoenberger <schoenberger@signsoft.com> for Qt/KDE port
Christopher Seawood <cls@seawood.org> for XbaeMatrix core dump
Richard Skelton <rich@brake.demon.co.uk> for Solaris cleanup
Henning Spruth <spruth@bigfoot.com> for German text & euro date rework
Ken Yamaguchi <gooch@ic.EECS.Berkeley.EDU> QIF import fixes; MYM import
... and I am sure that I have missed many others ...