Slashdot Mirror
Crossover Gets Quicken
Jeremy White writes: "involved with the Wine project 4 years ago, a major personal goal
for me was to switch my wife's computer to Linux. But there was
a simple caveat: "No Quicken, No Linux." As of today,
CrossOver Office now supports Quicken (and my wife was
beta tester #1 *grin*). The new version, 1.2.0, also supports
Visio and fixes a raft of bugs. The press release is
at Codeweavers
and a review can be found
here.
" I've got a similar situation - been running Quicken for the last ten years, and have only one data section lost, so this is pretty darn cool. And it freakin' works.
Why not give Kapital, put out by The Kompany, a try? Kapital is essentially a klone (pun intended) of Quicken for Linux. From what I read on their site, it has most of the features of Quicken, but no automatic online bank dowloads.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I used Crossover Office exclusively as an Outlook Client and Internet Explorer for about 2 months. GUI bugs and other little problems drove me nuts in OUTLOOK, but it was good enough. IE worked fairly well, allowing me to do my online banking, but that was about it. Flash and Media Player 6.4 did work within it, but it seemed to crash just as frequently as it did on Windows =/.
I use ie 6 daily with crossover. I havn't had a problem with the last release of crossover.
Stupid things kids do.
Scheduled Transactions are in CVS now, and could use some Feedback; they'll definitely be in 1.8, which we are hoping to get out in a couple/few months.
:)
The more forward-looking stuff I hope to add for 2.0, which is quite a ways off. If you're interested in jumping in and getting something basic [like a report which would contain some of the functionality] done for 1.8, please do so.
The patches will start rolling in next week as we merge our tree with the WineHQ tree.
We only keep Wine patches out while we're stabilizing a version of CrossOver.
Cheers,
Jeremy
I vote GnuCash. Seriously. All of the pretty graphs and predictions built into Quicken are great, but it is all absolutely useless when the data entry tools are borked. GnuCash uses a double entry system, which is far more sane than any single entry system I've every seen. (More resistant to typos as well.) And I can't believe that Quicken STILL doesn't have any way to tell you what your CLEARED balance is in your checking accounts. GnuCash has had this ever since I can remember, but I'll be damned if I can find a way to look at it in Quicken. Sure, the column is there, but other than the satisfaction of seeing a little "c" in the column for every transaction, I see no use for it in Quicken. My wife and I each keep track of our own accounts, and I'm consistantly able to tell you down to the penny how much money I have. And she is consistantly able to screw up her registers in Quicken because she can't see what her cleared balance is when she's comparing between Quicken and her online statements.
Like I said, GnuCash has the cleared balance neatly displayed at the top of the register at all times. It makes keeping your bank register and your finance software in sync much easier. But hey, I (and my wife) may just be unable to use Quicken properly. Which I must admit is odd, considering how easy GnuCash is for me to use on a daily basis. Plus, the learning curve was basically nil. I was up and running full time in less than 4 hours, and I have almost no experience tracking my finances this closely. (I used to just make sure I had a few thousand bucks in my account at all times, and then I could be pretty sure I wasn't going to over withdraw it.)
Kudos to the GnuCash team. My only complaint is that I can't download generic precompiled binaries off their website that will run on nearly all linux distros. But then again, that's not entirely their fault, considering how fucked up Linux gets in the cross distro compatibility area...
Anyhow, long story short.
By my vote: GnuCash == good. Quicken == garbage.
- IE would not always start under Linux, whereas all the other office programs always worked fine (with a few minor bugs). I never figured out why IE would sometimes just refuse to run.
- IE doesn't come with all the neccessary components and I could never work out how to install them afterwards. This means, if your web page requires Asian fonts or non-standard plugins, then there really isn't too much you can do.
Apart from these restrictions (which might very well be fixed with the new release of CrossOver), I have successfully tested my web pages using IE on Linux.I never had the need to run multiple instances of IE at the same time, but you can do so pretty easily under Linux. If I had to do this, I'd probably just use multiple instances of User Mode Linux, because it gives full guaranteed isolation and it is pretty straight forward to set up for this purpose. If you don't quite need this much isolation, then there probably is some way you can make CrossOver run multiple instances of Wine (possibly by using some "chroot()" tricks).
It's not perfect, and does need feedback, but it is there. Standard bank and credit card account are supported. Investement accounts will be when LibOFX (http://step.polymtl.ca/~bock/libofx/) matures. As for bill pay, unless banks start giving TRUE OFX access at large, that is still a long way off.
To blockquote the parent:
Don't remove the registry keys, change them to run from a drive that doesn't exist on your system, or change the extension to "c:\quickenw\foobar.dll.donotrun" or something.
You can also get something like the tiny little fireall, and block access based on PID information.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
I have been using Quickbooks 6.0 on crossover for a couple of weeks, it works fine.
In fact it works almost perfectly without crossover on CVS wine, the only problem is not being able to print, the print dialog won't come up (no small problem for this kind of sw). Crossover supplies the print dialog and the whole thing hangs together excellently.
Yeah. Let them give out broken code and let more people work on it. That is why people like to release stuff as open source in the first place.
Transgaming are evil. When a Debian developer wanted to package Winex (as he was entitled to under the license), Transgaming informed him that they would change the license to specifically change the license.
You can argue that Winex is good for your gaming needs on Linux, but don't EVER say that Transgaimng is good for the community.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Vanilla Wine would have enabled people to play their favourite Windows-only game on their favourite OS, IF Transgaming hadn't said to them "don't bother coding any DirectX stuff as we are working on it and we will let you have ours".
This manoeuvre, carried out well over a year ago, effectively killed Vanilla Wine's ability to run games and left Transgaming in the position where they could extort their $60 a year.
There are plenty of examples of how to make money with Linux, without having to sabotage other projects in order to do so.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
GnuCash is great with one major horrible problem..
Almost noone can install it without spending nights fighting with it's need for bleeding edge libs. The developers are not interested in anyone using their software that is not a programmer... Otherwise they would offer a statically linked version for download that eliminates the needs for bizzare and pre-pre alpha libs.
I reccomend to all my newbie-linux users and anyone else to stay away from GnuCash until the developers start desiring that people use it by releasing something that is installable (again statically linked) This has been asked in their mailing lists before and they basically flamed the people hard that asked.
GnuCash is a nice project that hopefully someday will actually become useable to the regular user.. until then... stay away from it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
http://www.intuit.com/support/quicken/2000/win/193 5.html