************ 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 ", where 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 wrote the original X-Accountant in Motif as a school project, taking it to version 0.9 by October 1997. Linas Vepstas 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 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 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 for attempted Java port/MoneyDance Christopher B. Browne for perl stock scripts George Chen for MS-Money QIF's & fixes Jeremey Collins for GnoMoney & GTK port Ciaran Deignan for AIX binary version Tyson Dowd for config/make patches & debian maint. Koen D'Hondt for Solaris patches to XmHTML Bob Drzyzgula for budgeting design notes Dave Freese for leap-year fix Otto Hammersmith for RedHat RPM version Jon K}re Hellan misc core dump fixes Tom Kludy for SGI Irix port Ted Lemon for NetBSD port Yannick Le Ny pour la traduction du readme en francais G. Allen Morris III for QIF core dump Peter Norton for a valiant attempt at a GTK port OmNiBuS web site graphics & content Myroslav Opyr for misc patches Alain Peyrat for configure.in patches Gavin Porter for euro style dates Ron Record for SCO Unixware & OpenServer binaries Dirk Schoenberger for Qt/KDE port Christopher Seawood for XbaeMatrix core dump Richard Skelton for Solaris cleanup Henning Spruth for German text & euro date rework Ken Yamaguchi QIF import fixes; MYM import ... and I am sure that I have missed many others ...