Crossover 4.2 Runs Quickbooks on Linux

Memorize writes "What's keeping you from switching your desktop to Linux? Linux has been able to run MS Office under Wine for a while now, but Codeweavers just announced Crossover 4.2 with support for Intuit Quicken and Quickbooks. I know that lack of a good bookkeeping app (other than Gnucash) has been keeping a lot of people from switching. It supports iTunes, too. What else do you need?"

Comments

I need...

[DeathPenguin]

>>What else do you need?

Games. Though I suppose a lot of people are content with Cedega. Still, that's an awful lot of versions of Wine to have just for compatibility.

Mainly just painless installation

[anthony_dipierro]

Probably the main thing stopping me from switching is the same thing stopping me from trying out XP. I don't want to format my hard drive, and I've only got one partition, which is NTFS. In theory I should still be able to install linux into a file in the NTFS filesystem, but I haven't had the time to bother with this.

Re:If you run a finance app under wine, you're a f

[anthony_dipierro]

What finance app can you trust 100%? The answer, of course, is none. One of the reasons they have these things called backups, you know.

Re:If you run a finance app under wine, you're a f

[k4rm4_p0l7c3]

Yeah, lord knows those tricky floating point values are hard to get right when you translate them

(give me a break..)

Not a huge need for Quicken..

[SocialEngineer]

My mother uses MoneyDance to do her accounting schtuff. She loves it. Plus, it's available for Linux, OSX, and Windows. She switched to it from Quicken's software a while back.

Re:Not a huge need for Quicken..

[ManxStef]

I'll second that - been using it on Mac OS X for a good few months now and I'm very happy with it. Sean and the dev team are very helpful - you can mail them via support, or bring something up in the mailing list, and you'll get a direct response: bit of a difference to Quicken's attitude! (They've completely withdrawn from the UK.) It's targeted at personal finance management and not really suitable for business accounts, though, for that I'd suggest GNUCash (via Fink if you're on OS X - compile from source, don't use the binary as it's old and somewhat buggy. Yes, the dependencies are huge unfortunately!)

There are some good finance apps for Linux as far as I'm aware, check out this (dated) review:
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=8217/ur0305l /ur0305l.html

MSMoney and Quicken are popular for a reason, though: they're actually fairly good, so don't be surprised if some of the features you're accustomed to don't behave the same or even aren't there at all. (For instance, MoneyDance doesn't do the equivalent of Quicken's Classes yet, though it will do very soon as it's near the top of the feature requests list.) Still, I think it's worth the short-term pain of switching to know that your software won't suddenly magically "expire", and that you're not locked into a platform because your accounts software only works on Windows. (Speaking of which, I'd *love* to see someone overcome GNUCash's evil dependencies and port it to Windows, it'd massively increase it's uptake & increase people's exposure to alternatives to the Big 2.)

GNUCashToQIF may come in handy for some (such as those testing out MoneyDance):
http://gnucashtoqif.sourceforge.net/

And there's a pretty comprehensive thread on Mac finance apps here:
http://www.timandkathy.co.uk/journal/2005/02/05/lo oking-for-mac-os-x-personal-finance-software/

As well as a decent comparative review of Mac apps here (with a good overview of MoneyDance, so as to not be too off-topic!):
http://www.theappleblog.com/2005/03/19/moneydance- get-your-groove-on/

Appgen Mybooks reads Quickbooks files

[tzanger]

And it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux natively. None of this WINE nonsense. Clicky.

Not affiliated with them by any means, just a happy customer. I'm planning on eliminating AccPAC and MiSYS at my office for their Appgen Custom Suite since it too is multiplatform, modular and you can get a developer license without the hassles that AccPAC has.

Quasar

[GRW]

For business accounting on Linux there is Quasar, which is a "full function, stand-alone business accounting package." It has both a GPL and commercial licenses.

Exactly

[Julian Morrison]

Not just incorrect calculations, but incorrect saves, incorrect loads, parially implemented system functions that don't do what the coders expected, harmless dangling pointers in Windows that bite you in Wine, etc etc. Not that I know of any such, but you can't safely assume they don't exist.

This is a generalization of: if you run a tested app on an untested configuration, it's no longer properly tested! That's just common sense.

Do your finance in OO.o spreadsheet or in GnuCash, or boot across to Windows. Doing it under emulation (a known-incomplete emulation, even!) is just stupid.

As a someone that has programed under Windows.

[LWATCDR]

" Not just incorrect calculations, but incorrect saves, incorrect loads, partially implemented system functions that don't do what the coders expected, harmless dangling pointers in Windows that bite you in Wine, etc etc. Not that I know of any such, but you can't safely assume they don't exist."
And you would bet your life that none of those errors exists under Windows? I would not. Frankly the windows API in known to be incomplete as well:) MFC has many known issues and goodness knows how many unknown issues.
A proper accounting system will have many checks that will also work under wine. While I would probably agree with you if we where talking about running a "life critical" system but for a simple accounting system like quick books or quicken? I wouldn't worry about it much more than I would worry about running it under Windows. BTW would you freak about running quickbooks under Longhorn when it is released? or a version that ran under 98 on 2000 or XP?