############################################################ GnuCash 1.9.x README file. NOTE: THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT RELEASE!!! THIS VERSION HAS NOT BEEN TESTED PROPERLY AND MAY DO ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK (AND KEEP *LOTS* OF BACKUPS) If you want something a bit more tested, please use the 1.8 stable series. ------------------------------------------------------------ ################## Table of Contents: ------------------ - Overview - Upgrading from 1.6.x - Upgrading from 1.8.x - Dependencies - Invocation/running - Internationalization - Building & Installing - Supported Platforms - Additional Download Sites - Getting the Source via CVS - Developing GnuCash ######## Overview -------- 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. A full set of reports allow you to see the state of your finances. 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 quick-fill to automatically complete the transaction. The interface is customizable from within the application itself (no editing config files :) ) - Scheduled Transactions: GnuCash now has the ability to automatically create and enter transactions, remind when a transaction is due, give a choice of entering a transaction or postponing it and remove an automated transaction after a certain period. - Mortgage & Loan Repayment Druid: Used to setup a variable payment loan scheduled transaction. - Small Business Accounting Features: GnuCash now can be used for Customer and Vendor tracking, Invoicing and Bill Payment, and using different Tax and Billing Terms in a small business. - OFX Import: GnuCash is the first free software application to support the Open Financial Exchange protocol that many banks and financial services are moving to use. The development of OFX and HBCI support has also resulted in an improved transaction matching system that more accurately picks duplicate transactions. - HBCI Support: GnuCash is the first free software application to support the German Home Banking Computer Interface protocol which includes statement download, initiate bank transfers and direct debits. - Quicken File Import: Import Quicken QIF style files. QIF files are automatically merged to eliminate duplicate transactions. - 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). - Get Stock & Mutual Fund quotes from various web sites, update portfolio automatically (more funds being added regularly). - Reports: Display Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss, Portfolio Valuation, Transaction Reports, or account balance tracking, or export them as HTML. You can write your own custom report if you know a little Scheme. Reports can now be performed over an accounting period! - 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. - New Multi-Currency Transaction Handling: GnuCash no longer requires separate currency exchange accounts to handle multiple currency transfers. - 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 compound 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 embedded scheme support via Guile. - File access is locked in a network-safe fashion, preventing accidental damage if several users attempt to access the same file, even if the file is NFS-mounted. - Provides a byte-stream format, which allows accounts and account groups to be transmitted to other processes via pipes or sockets. - International date handling, many different translations. - New User Manual and Help: A brand new user help has been written which focuses on how to do tasks in conjunction with a Tutorial and Concepts guide that gives the user background information on using GnuCash. - Redesigned Menu's: The GnuCash menu's have been redesigned to conform more with the new GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Home Page: http://gnucash.org/ Precompiled binaries: http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/ Development versions: http://www.gnucash.org/en/hacking.phtml ############################### Upgrading from earlier versions ------------------------------- There are many, many changes from the 1.6 series - have a look at the NEWS file if you want more details. In particular: - GnuCash now requires g-wrap 1.3.4 or better. See the "dependencies" section of this file for more detail. - The data files are not able to be accessed by 1.6 once the new features are used and saved, i.e. they are not backwards-compatible! So backup your data! - The help documentation of gnucash has been moved to the separate package gnucash-docs. If you see error messages like "URL not found" when clicking on the "Help" menu item, you need to install the separate package gnucash-docs. We hope you enjoy all the new features! ############ Dependencies ------------ The following packages are required to be installed to run GnuCash: [FIXME; see README.dependencies] To be able to use certain features of GnuCash, such as reports and network stock price downloads, you must have the following packages below installed (in addition to those listed above). perl: Almost any version of perl5 should work. I run perl-5.004 In addition, some perl modules need to be installed. You can run the script 'update-finance-quote' as root to obtain the latest versions of required packages. To use the new import features (OFX and HBCI) you need to obtain the following; libofx: This library provide support for OFX file imports. GnuCash-1.8.10 and newer needs at least the version libofx-0.7.0 or newer. Sources can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/libofx/ aqbanking/aqhbci: This library provide support for HBCI file imports. GnuCash has mostly been tested against the 0.9.7 version, though any newer version should also work. Sources can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqbanking and http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqhbci/. More info in doc/README.HBCI. ####### Running ------- For GnuCash invocation details, see the manpage in doc/gnucash.1. You can also run gnucash --help for the command line options. You can start GnuCash at the command-line, with "gnucash" or "gnucash ", where is a GnuCash account file. Sample accounts can be found in "data" subdirectory. *.xac 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. GnuCash responds to the following environment variables: GNC_BOOTSTRAP_SCM - the location of the initial bootstrapping scheme code. GUILE_LOAD_PATH - an override for the GnuCash load path, used when loading scheme files. It should be a string in the same form as the PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. GNC_MODULE_PATH - an override for the GnuCash load path, used when loading gnucash modules. It should be a string representing a proper scheme list. It should be a string in the same form as the PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. GNC_DEBUG - enable debugging output. This allows you to turn on debugging earlier in the startup process than you can with --debug. #################### Internationalization -------------------- Message catalogues exist for many different languages. These are enabled with environment variables. For example, Francais, en bash: export LANG=fr_FR Francais, en tcsh: setenv LANG fr_FR German version: export LANG=de_DE ##################### Building & Installing --------------------- (For additional build system details, see doc/README.build-system.) GnuCash uses GNU Automake to handle the build process, so for most of the details, see the generic instructions in INSTALL. (If you are building directory from CVS, read the README.cvs for more instructions.) Below we detail the GnuCash specific bits. Prior to building GnuCash, you will have to obtain and install the following packages: libtool: Available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu. RPM's and debs are widely available with most distributions. gnome development system: headers, libraries, etc. libxml: available from ftp.gnome.org g-wrap: RPM's, debs, and source available at http://www.gnucash.org/pub/g-wrap. You should use g-wrap 1.3.4 or later. texinfo: If you are building from CVS, you need the GNU texinfo package, version 4.0 or later. What you'll need to get and install in order to make sure you have all of these pieces properly installed for your particular operating system flavor will vary, but here's at least a partial list of what you'll need for the systems we know about: Debian/GNU/Linux: current: libgnome-dev libgtkhtml-dev guile1.4 libguile9-dev libguile9-slib SuSE: see doc/build-suse.txt GnuCash understands a few non-standard ./configure options. You should run ./configure --help for the most up to date summary of the supported options, but here are some more detailed descriptions of some of them: --enable-opt-style-install GnuCash supports two types of install, the first is the normal /usr or /usr/local/ style, where the files are installed into /usr/bin /usr/lib, etc. This is the default. The second style is the FSSTND, opt-style install. In this style, all of the files are installed under a common subdirectory, often in /usr/local/opt, with the binaries going to /usr/local/opt/'packagename'/bin, the libs going to /usr/local/opt/'packagename'/lib, etc. To request this style of install, just use the --enable-opt-style-install option to ./configure. If you only want a particular language installed, you can set the LINGUAS environment variable before you run configure. For example, to only install the French translations, run $ export LINGUAS=fr $ ./configure If you want to make sure that all languages get installed, run $ unset LINGUAS $ ./configure Note that while you need the Gnome libraries installed, you don't need to have a Gnome desktop. Runtime and install destinations are separate. The --prefix you specify to configure determines where the resulting binary will look for things at runtime. Normally this determines where a "make install" will put all the files. However, automake also supports the variable. DESTDIR is used during the `make install' step to relocate install objects into a staging area. Each object and path is prefixed with the value of `DESTDIR' before being copied into the install area. Here is an example of typical DESTDIR usage: make DESTDIR=/tmp/staging install This places install objects in a directory tree built under `/tmp/staging'. If `/gnu/bin/foo' and `/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4' are to be installed, the above command would install `/tmp/staging/gnu/bin/foo' and `/tmp/staging/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4'. DESTDIR can be helpful when trying to build install images and packages. NOTE: If you have installed different parts of Gnome in different places (for instance, if you've installed gtkhtml in /usr/local) you will need to set the environment variables GNOME_PATH and GNOME_LIBCONFIG_PATH. See the manpage for gnome-config for more details. ################### Supported Platforms ------------------- GnuCash 1.8.x is known to work with the following operating systems: GNU/Linux -- x86, Sparc, PPC Solaris -- Sparc FreeBSD -- x86 OpenBSD -- x86 MacOS X -- PPC Previous versions have been known to work on the following platforms, but their current status is unknown: 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://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash (high-bandwidth) or http://linas.org/linux/gnucash (slow-www ) for precompiled (but *very old*) binaries for these platforms GnuCash can probably be made to work with most POSIX-ish platforms, provided the libraries and toolchain are available. ######################### Additional Download Sites ------------------------- You can also download GnuCash from: - http://download.sourceforge.net/gnucash You can download GnuCash Solaris packages from: - http://www.unixrealm.com/downloads/ You can get GnuCash Mandrake packages on Mandrake Cooker sites. Precompiled binaries & pre-requisite packages can be found at the following sites. The GnuCash versions here are all *extremely* old, and were indeed from GnuCash's ancestor "x-accountant". IBM AIX 4.1.5 -- SMIT-installable images -- warning, this is from the 1.0 series of xacc 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 -- this is from the 1.0 series of xacc 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 ####################### 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 in the experimental development tree do a cvs -z3 -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout -r HEAD gnucash To get a copy of the source in the gnucash-1.8 stable production tree do a cvs -z3 -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.gnucash.org:/home/cvs/cvsroot checkout -r gnucash-1-8-branch gnucash ################## Developing GnuCash ------------------ Before you start developing GnuCash, you should do the following: 1. Read the file src/doc/coding-style.txt to learn about the coding-styles used in the GnuCash source code. 2. Several of the directories under src contain files called design.txt which explain many aspects of GnuCash's design. Read those. 3. Go to the GnuCash website and skim the archives of the GnuCash development mailing list. 4. Join the GnuCash development mailing list. See the GnuCash website for details on how to do this. Submitting a Patch: This section has been removed to the file README.patches Please consult that file for details on using the script provided to make patches suitable for submitting to the GnuCash development team. Thank you. Test for Andreas Köhler.