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Gnucash 1.3.0 Beta Released
Jeremy Collins wrote in to tell us that Gnucash 1.3.0 Beta is out.
We keep the software release announcements to a minimum and let
more appropriate sites handle them, but this is pretty significant. Gnucash is the best quickenesque program under Linux today, and as we all know: it's those pesky end user apps that we lag behind other OSs. We've already got several word processors, spreadheets and image manipulation coming along nicely, but seeing development happen in the financial package area (also games and video) is important. Anyway, I'd suggest checking this one out: I've been using it since xacc and it's good if you're anal.
Check out the ftp.gnucash.org and report bugs if you see 'em.
Let's get serious about what's out there in spreadsheets and word processors; we're not even comparable to the late 80's.
.5G of memory. I really haven't used swriter 3.1, so can't comment on it.
Word Processors:
WordPerfect. It works, except for the deleted features. You can't print a WP file with an embedded postscript on a non-linux machine (such as windows); it puts a warning message about unsupported features instead. Overall, though, this is a single functioning wordprocessor.
Lyx. But it's not really a wordprocessor. It flatly beats any word processor for what it does, and the use of lyx or raw latex for technical writing is really a preferences issue--my tendency would be raw latex, but lyx shows me my equations in a form I can edit directly from the keyboard, and tends to use far less
keystrokes than raw latex, so I prefer it. If you want to wrap text around a table or figure, or do certain things with table formatting, lyx inherits all of latex's warts. Unfortunately, these are part of what is expected of a word processor in common business use. ALso, to print on pre-printed forms, the micro-management that is antithetical to latex in necessary; lyx never will do such things (nor should it).
Staroffice. Let's be serious. If you can live with crashes, and have enough memory, you can get by with 5.1. It's probably no worse than the current versions of Word. And then there's the missing documentation and miscelanous quirks. Don't even think of running it with less than 48Mb--and memory doesn't make everything faster--it still takes forever to load with
The rest: let's face it; they're just plain not finished.
Word processor summary: unless latex is appropriate to your circumstances, the only choice is wordperfect. I preseme the commercial version interacts with other versions of wordperfect better than the downloadable one. You'd be better off with Word 4.0 or 5.1 for the mac than anything but LyX.
Spreadsheets:
even worse.
Gnumeric. Maybe someday it will be finished. There's more there than there used to be. Want a graph? A border on a cell? Forget it; you can't have it yet.
wingz. sure, it can be downloaded free, but its day seems to come and gone. And a single crash where it scrambles my data beyond recovery (messed with the original file rather than using a working copy, it appears) is one more than I tolerate from any application, ever. The graphing features aren't up to Excel 3.0 from the mid 80's.
Miscellaneous text-based sheets: OK, if visicalc did what you needed, I suppose.
staroffice 5.1. You better have a lot of horsepower again, and being willing to put up with the crashes. I've had files that would crash it *every* time the second time I tried to print to postscript, and sometimes the first print attempt as well. You also get the attempt to take over your entire computer with a new desktop, attempts to force you to it's own "work" folder--I have found no way to tell it to use ~ in a way it will remember; a popup box every time you try to use any format other than starcalc5, trying to get you to choose it instead (with that as the default), (did I mention lots of crashes yet?), limited graph choices, a scripting/macro facility that is presumabley documented *somewhere*. ANd you better have a minimum of 64M.
Staroffice 3.1. The closest thing to usable I have found. Isn't *as* aggressive in trying to take over your life, crashes less than 5.1, can sort of run on this 24M machine. ON the other hand, the time to paste once formula into a 200x15 region is measured in minutes (I launched lynx and was to about the end of the
word processor section and it was still trying to paste). Easier to configure and adjust than 5.1, but you can get wierd results printing. Screen writes seem to be bad even for motif (as in overdone and high overhead); forget using it remotely over a cable modem that can sustain 500kbit/second
Summary: None of the contenders match up to excel 3.0 in performance, usability, stability, or features.
Financial:
Gnucash sounds like a nice step, but it also sounds like it still hasn't
caught up to quicken 1.0--little things like electronic transfer still missing if I'm readng this correctly.
hawk
"...versus what?" I hear you cry.
PHASAR was a home financial package for DOS systems, later ported to the Amiga (where I've been using it for the last several years). Sadly, it looks like PHASAR can't handle the Y2K transition, and I was hoping GnuCash would be able to replace it (thereby allowing me to fully decommission my Amiga).
Alas, in a sense, I've been "spoiled" by PHASAR, as it seems to operate on a different philosophy, and I couldn't warm up to the last release of GnuCash.
Here's the issue: As near as I can determine, in GnuCash, you set up different accounts (checking, credit cards, etc.). When you want to record a transaction, you open the appropriate account in a window, enter the transaction(s), and close it. Perfectly straightforward.
With PHASAR, however, all accounts are open simultaneously. You specify the account with every transaction you enter. This may seem like a lot more typing, but it isn't; PHASAR has auto-complete, so you can type the first letter or two of the account and it will fill in the rest.
Now it just so happens that I keep all my receipts, so I can enter them into the computer. With PHASAR, I can just key in the receipts as I find them. With GnuCash, I'd have to separate them into their relevant accounts first. This is a bummer; the computer should be doing the sorting for me. It is the primary thing that has kept me from moving to GnuCash.
If GnuCash got a "unified" transaction entry window, I'd convert (extra credit: reading old PHASAR data files). I have no idea how hard it would be to add such a thing; I haven't looked at the code. From what I can tell, it's an unholy mixture of C, Perl, and GUILE/Scheme. (If you're using a distro that isn't package-based, like Slackware, it's an absolute b*tch to install.)
Comments welcome.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The software doesn't control your account, it merely downloads statements from your financial institution and reconciles these statements against the transactions you have entered into your computer...
But your just here to bash Microsoft rather than have a real conversation, so back away from the keyboard and get back to class kid-o.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
...interface with my bank and brokerages systems and automatically update my accounts and balances. This is one of the nicest features of Microsoft Money.
Anyone know if this sort of functionality is even planned?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I know this is a little unrelated, but it is at least topical - does anyone know of any OS projects to develop something like TurboTax? I'ts really handy having software to help fill out all of the forms I need, but it annoys me buying a new version every year just in case something should change!
I wouldn't mind putting more effort into verification of what results the software actually produced, as long as it could help just fill in forms initially, and knew how to generate a 1040PC formatted document for the printer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The sources and binaries are also available
via http
Not as fancy as Quicken but has worked well and reliably.
Last time I looked at gnucash it required a bunch (4?) libraries that I did not have and was not excited about getting. So has this improved?
Noel
RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix
kayaking
Here's hoping GNUCash speeds on it's way past the functionality of existing commercial programs.
Here's why:
Last week, a client of ours started seeing fatal data corruption in their financial software. It had been a couple weeks since they had migrated to the new '2000' version of the software. The problem is so bad that they had to restore from backup and re-enter 1/2 day's transactions by hand. A quick check of the SIG on the ISV's website for the product showed at least one other user with the exact same problems, and at least one other consultant advising a freeze on '2000' installations for the forseeable future (he had seen the problem before, too).
It's Monday now and the client has been backing up his data files twice a day, running is single user mode, trying to avoid any more trouble while he waits for the vendor to issue a patch. This is bad enough, but his only other options are:
We've been trying to convince these folks to go to a free software solution for awhile, but this isn't the way we wanted to do it. Their entire business is locked up in the proprietary database of this (expensive) commercial software...If the ISV screws this up further, they'll have an easy court case to win and no business for the three years it takes to settle.
Happy Monday All!
adric<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
This is the standard that was started by CheckFree, Intuit and Microsoft in early 1997 and seems to be what most banks are supporting for communication with financial software.
My bank lets me download a file in this format, while Discover Card seems to use some direct link from Quicken and MS Money. The latest version of the format seems to be XML.
The specifications are available (in .pdf) on the site, as well as information on certifying software that uses the standard. I don't know if GnuCash supports OFX, but it would be nice if it did.
Their ftp server is already having some trouble keeping up. Somebody, please mirror them quick or post a list of known mirror sites. They don't have a list on their site from what I could find.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I installed a Linux workstation (PC) and a Linux server (also a PC w/gnucash) in a small pizza shop that it local to the area not more than a few months ago.
Their previous application, "Pizza Shop," was DOS based program for accouting, etc, written in QuickBASIC of all things and was an utter piece of shit. They paid big bucks for this too.... and now GNUCash totally blows it away. It's great to see the free software community come through and deliver such good quality applications.
http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash
As a side note, I'd like to point out that this release is really big news because the GnuCash team finally realized that deploying on 3 GUI widget platforms simultaneously (Motif, GTK, and Qt) was sapping at their development time and just leading to breakage. The previous post-xacc releases were a huge pain to build, which lead to the emergence of other Quicken substitutes like Gnofin.
From my initial test run, it looks like GnuCash has a new customer. Congratulations!
- Richie
Managing your finances from your PC is good. Managing your financies with free software is better. Why? If you are like me, do you really trust a closed source program with all your important, confidential information? Sure, maybe a credit card number here and there to buy stuff over the web, but there is a level of protection there. If somebody steals your number your liability is limited. But if somebody manages to get ahold of your private finances, it's less like somebody stole your wallet and more like somebody broke into your house and looked at all your private letters.
It seems to me that there are two benefits to an open source financial program. First, you can be as sure of your security as you are willing to study the source code. This means that you are better protected both against attackers AND against the off chance of backdoors or other security problems that might (but probably wouldn't be) introduced by the programmers of a proprietary program.
The other benefit is one that is not yet realized. Why not integrate real GNUcash into the program GNUcash? A kind of "open source money" similar to Digicash or whatever. Not only would all the security concerns of the technical community be satisfied (untraceable, unforgeable, no key escrows or whatever) but while we're at it we can revolutionize the monetary systems. World domination with Linux? Try world domination by controlling (and freeing) the world's money supply!
Hey, it could happen.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I can finally keep track of those 200,000 credit card numbers that I "received" last week.
*grin*
Now that that is working fairly well, it starts to make sense to try to automate the creation of transactions, which includes:
Surprisingly, a critical issue with all three of these things is that of creating a suitable user interface.
In particular, with QIF and OFX input, there needs to be a user interface to control the translation from the data file's set of accounts to those that the user has set up in GnuCash.
I've written a pretty slick QIF parser; deployment of that has been blocked due to the need to have a front end to let the user decide which account to use in GnuCash. The same will be true for OFX files.
Note that some financial institutions generate OFX/QIF files that omit entirely the account, thereby requiring that you manually set up a destination account for the expense.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
- Planning ahead. Your online bank will tell you what your balance is now, but a good personal finance app will tell you what your balance is at the end of the month. Which is critical when you want that balance always to be in the black.
- Organizing several accounts (my wife and I have at least 6 to our name. Most of them have online access, bill pay, etc., which I use religiously. But it doesn't cover everything.)
- Tracking non-account-based assets (a home, cars, etc.) To be fair, I didn't see anything to indicate that GnuCash would do this. But it should, or I won't be able to use it.
- Calendaring/scheduling. Your bank can schedule bill pays, but can it schedule an entire loan payoff? This overlaps with planning ahead, but having the visual view of the calendar is vital. GnuCash should have this too.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.