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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.
Was wondering if anyone familiar with Quicken and GnuCash could give a good comparison of the features and usability of both programs, from the standpoint of someone who wants to start managing his or her personal finances. Would it be worth it to buy crossover and quicken, or could the average user get the hang of GnuCash easily enough?
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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!!!
Whats the point of turning linux into a windows machine? If you want to run Windows programs stabably you have this OS called Windows 2000. Seriously this isn't ment to troll or be a flambait, but the apps make the OS why not focus on making great apps for linux instead of making linux this OS that can run Windows apps.
Does it automatically schedule version upgrades and payments to M$, or do you have to put those in manually?
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.
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 don't want to run "windows programs" stabiliy. I want to run the best software on my pc--and much of the time, that's software that only works on windows.
Face it; Linux has a piddly market penetration, so bad that it's well nigh impossible to make money supporting it all. A small company (or just a well-run, tight margins, efficient company) that only has the time to develop for one platform will choose windows; unless they're serious hardware or a custom solution, they'd be foolish not to.
By letting Linux run windows apps, Linux makes all those developers that are windows only potential allies, instead of the definite enemies that are now. If your reveune model depends on windows being on the desktop, you're not going to take kindly to efforts to replace it with something else that won't run your program. If this something else *will* run your program, as well as windows will and on the same hardware, then you've nothing to worry about.
- Under the 'General' tab of quicken options, select "Hide advertisements in online financial center"
- Under the 'Startup' tab, select 'none'
- Customize the 'My Finances' page to remove the alerts box. This feature does nothing for me, anyway.
- Right-click the alert bar at the bottom and select the option that removes the alert bar.
- Remove all Quicken items from Windows' Start folder.
That's all I remember. Like I said, it took some doing, but I don't remember seeing an ad since January.Except:
Time: Priceless
Quicken + Crossover Office
Adjusted Total: $114.90
GNU Cash
Adjusted Total: $->infinity
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What other must-have "mission critical" applications does WINE fully support, or will support soon? Long-term Linux users sometimes avoid tasks or fileformats that are only served by certain applications. New adoptees need a transition plan that includes their favorite applications.
Here are a few I could think of, but I expect there are others.
(I know that there's Linux programs that are almost as nice, or even in some cases better. The Windows ports and additional tools that accompany the free "PanoTools" are far superior to the available Linux/GIMP integration at this point, for example. This is about transitioning people who are lost without some familiar applications.)
[
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."
;)
and if Crossover fails Jeremy can change wife
- 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.
Quicken is spyware - or something worse. There are a few DLLs that run in the background, one which contacts Intuit's site every once and a while. It's totally random, and using Ethereal, you can see that it's sending small encrypted packets. It runs all the time, not just when you are using Quicken.
There is no obvious way to disable this. There is an option hidden away in the configuration to "disable background downloading", but you cannot select it! You have to use a "secret key combo" that Intuit's tech support gives out over the phone - "SHIFT-4-CLICK" - in order to select this option.
But here's the kicker - the next time you run Quicken it re-enables this "background downloading" again! If you remove this DLL from the Windows registry, Quicken adds it again the next time you run it.
Intuit says these DLLs are harmless programs that "keep your software up to date and bug free", but the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to remove, and so difficult to detect, makes me wonder what this is REALLY doing.. and I'm not being paranoid, just curious. It's my computer, not theirs!!
Because it's closed source, we'll never know what it's doing.
I have not seen much talk about this on usenet, etc. Adaware does not catch it.
Look here here for some google hits on the topic. I have not found a thread where someone else has noticed that the SHIFT-4-CLICK method is only *temporary*, and that it comes back again later behind your back..
Anyway, just wanted to rant about this. I find it disturbing that my (former) financial software has such a great need to send stuff in the background without my permission!
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, so it runs. Does it require you to run it as root? Quicken on 2000 must be run as Administrator*; try to run it as a non-privileged user and it fails. I'm a sysadmin, and had to install Quicken for the department (bitch-)secretary(-from-hell), and it flat-out refused to run as anything less than a local admin. I called Intuit (not made easier by the fact that they hide their phone number, encouraging you to use their useless website instead), and finally found a tech with a clue (about the fourth person to whom I spoke). He confirmed for me that you do, in fact, have to run it as admin, and that there's no way around it.* I had to give the secretary (also an incredible dolt, and very protective of "her" machine) local admin, which she has used to install unauthorized software, disjoin herself from the domain (woo-hoo! I only support our domain--she's fucked, particularly for backups), etc. That one poorly-designed program has opened me up to all sorts of trouble. In any case, I swore that day that I'd never use an Intuit product for any purpose, and I'd make sure others are aware of their boneheaded design. Use it at your own risk.
*I'm told there's another method to get it running as a non-privileged user, that being to specifically grant write-access to all the directories that the program uses, but I haven't been able to try it, because of the aforementioned secretary's protective attitude (don't touch my computer!), and since she has disjoined, I don't care anymore anyway.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
http://www.intuit.com/support/quicken/2000/win/193 5.html