GnuCash 1.9.0 Released

Grendel Drago writes "The GnuCash team have released GnuCash 1.9.0. After literally years of waiting, GnuCash is now a GTK2 application. The current version is unstable, and testers are needed."

Comments

Finally

[Mrs. Grundy]

FTFA:
...might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime.

Finally...software that is a perfect fit for my finances.

Re:Finally

[david.gilbert]

From TFA:

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!", the first of several unstable 1.9.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series, and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

Just what I needed

[cryptochrome]

A buggy, unstable money management program... BRILLIANT!

Years of waiting...

[gameboyhippo]

Who's been waiting? I liked the application the way it is. With something as important as finacial tracking, there's no way I'd want to test it. I don't need a pretty ui to tell me I'm broke.

Re:Years of waiting...

[jsled]

The gtk1 libraries are soon simply not going to be distributed by distros, and with them software that depends on them. I too was fine with the UI, but we (GnuCash) would rather keep being distributed.

FINALLY!

[VValdo]

I've been waiting for this FOREVER. Another alternative for Linux is Moneydance, a java app that apparently spoofs Windows quicken online banking on Macs (or Linux)..

It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.

Oh, and speaking of which--y'all know that you can file your taxes for free, right? Or at least 70% of Americans can. Down from 100% last year, but still something.

W

Re:FINALLY!

[MBCook]

Ask, and you shall recieve:

1. The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)
2. The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Personal Finance Managers, Part 2

Courtasy of the always great LWN. They are from September of last year.

Re:FINALLY!

[Noksagt]

It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.

I maintain the FW Finance FAQ: Free and Open Source Finance Applications, which (1)offers this, (2)links to other (usually more detailed) comparisons, and (3)offers ongoing discussion on the topic.

I Am Really Interested In Looking This Over

[Real World Stuff]

Since it is slashdotted, here are some excerpts from the site:

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!", the first of several unstable 1.9.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series, and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

What's New in GnuCash 1.9.0?
o Welcome to GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!" the first of several unstable releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down bugs.
o WARNING WARNING WARNING - Make sure you make backups of any files used in testing versions of GnuCash in the 1.9.x series. Although the developers go to great lengths to ensure that no data will be lost we cannot guarentee that your data will not be affected if for some reason GnuCash crashes in testing these releases.
o PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Gn uCash
o If you have the urge to help beyond testing please get involved in the discussions on the GnuCash mailing lists which you will find at http://www.gnucash.org./ We especially need people to help with updating the documentation as all texts refer currently to the 1.8.x series. Please see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development on how to get involved.
o PS I'm not going to list the many features changed or updated in this release because obviously there is so much that has changed.
Caveats

Caveats for testers:

* Any 1.9.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime. If you test some serious work in a 1.9.x release, make sure you hit "Save" after ever non-trivial workstep.
* Keep in mind that features which are not used in everyday work might crash unexpectedly at all times. This includes but is not limited to: graphical reports, scheduled transaction editor, price editor, financial calculator, OFX/QIF/HBCI import.
* Especially all the new features might crash instantly on testing. This applies in particular to any of the budget-related features. We may always decide to disable such new features for the initial 2.0.0 release, and re-enable them in a later release.
* The documentation is completely outdated. All help texts usually only refer to the 1.8.x series; please expect all descriptions in the help texts to be totally wrong when applied to the upcoming 1.9.x series. Everyone is invited to help improve the documentation; see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development on how to get involved.

How can you help?

* Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there. Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Gn uCash
* Translating: The new release comes with plenty of new translation strings. If you consider contributing a translation, we invite you to test this release already, but please keep in mind that we are not yet in our string freeze phase. Please check http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status for updates on this, as we recommend to wait for the string

Special Computer

[Blue Mandelbrot]

Maybe Bill can finally have his taxes processed on a 'normal' computer now that GnuCash 1.9.0 is out?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/01/141823 3

KMyMoney

[Just Some Guy]

I gave up waiting and switched to KMyMoney about a year ago. It did everything that my relatively simple personal finances require, plus supports nifty stuff like using KIO slaves to load and save its data files (so I can use sftp:// from work to view my checking account on my home machine).

Now, I have nothing bad to say about GnuCash. It's a good program and served me well when I used it. I only mention KMyMoney as an alternative worth considering.

Re:KMyMoney

[Just Some Guy]

I don't want to drag along all the KDE cruft just to run a money management app.

Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?

Don't be a jackass. No reasonable size application is written from scratch anymore. The KMyMoney folks decided to use the KDE framework, just like the GnuCash group used all the "Gnome cruft" instead. If you want something totally minimal, perhaps I could introduce you to vi, bc, and grep. Wait - scratch that - bc depends on ncurses and readline. It may not be "pure" enough for someone of your discriminating tastes.

The Kot

[msbsod]

Here is a little example from the Gnucash source code:

char *
libgncmod_tax_us_LTX_gnc_module_path(void) {
#ifdef LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX
const char *thislocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, NULL);
if (strncmp(thislocale, "de_DE", 5) == 0)
return g_strdup("gnucash/tax/de_DE");
else
#endif
return g_strdup("gnucash/tax/us");
}

In plain English, this means if you know only your little backyard, then there is just US. Otherwise your world may include Germany, and the rest is, of course, US. Now, some people may find this funny. Others might cry. I am just confused. How can they write such code? It should read if Germany ... else if US ... else if ... else UNKNOWN, STOP! (or use perhaps a switch/case/default statement).

The last time I put numbers like the shown 5 into code was almost three decades ago in a Basic program. I have seen much better GNU software and hope someone removes the word GNU from this project's name.

No offense, but I thought financial planning software should comply with higher standards.

Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

[wik]

>I'm not sure how many extraneous libraries GnuCash 1.9 relies on...

If it's anything like the 1.8 version, it relies on at piles of esoteric packages. Why this program has significant portions written in scheme (of all things!), I will never understand.

I use the program, but it requires extraordinary care and maintenance. There was an issue with debian package dependencies sometime last year which completely broke gnucash for weeks. It's simply poor software design. Now I run it within a vmware player image which never gets updated, so I can be sure that it'll start tomorrow.

Re:With a web browser

[jsled]

Well, we use gtkhtml for rendering the reports, which emit html. While we used to have it setup to do "arbitrary" browsing, I'm pretty sure that's not working in 2.0. It [abritrary browsing from w/in GnuCash] is certainly not a direction the current devs are interested in going.

Free, my arse!

[PinkyDead]

There was a /. article about two weeks ago about Novell listing apps to be ported or something like that and at the top was Quicken/Quickbooks, which I use and am well pissed off that I can't get it to work on Linux.

One reply suggested that GnuCash was a viable alternative to quicken. My problem with GnuCash (or really with Quickbooks) was that I couldn't export the accounts from Quickbooks into GnuCash. Well anyway, at the time of the Novell article, we had just hit our year end, so we had P&L and Balance sheets for everything.

So, perfect time to try GnuCash, just resetting everything off the Balance Sheet. Anyway, through this process I discovered that Quickbooks had 'lost' some of my previous VAT payments. Added them all up - £400 for me (don't worry I triple checked - no messing with the tax man). So GnuCash wasn't free for me - they actually paid me to use it. Cheers, GnuCash!

I miss the simple 'VAT Report' from QuickBooks - it's quite tricky in GnuCash. But if it was costing me £400 - I can handle the minor inconvenience.

I'm really looking forward to the 1.9.0 - hopefully, some more of the inconveniences will disappear and maybe the interface will be a little less GTK1.