[wplug] New content for Jonathan (GNUCASH tales II)

[Procario, Michael]

I wrote about my experiences with Gnucash, a checkbook/accounting program,
several months ago. I liked the program just fine but I found it crashed too
often. I thought I would update people on my experiences.

At my last report I was running one of the last betas before 1.4.0 came out.
I am now running 1.4.8 on a Mandrake 7.0 system with 128 MB of RAM. It seems
better, but it still crashes. The problem appears to be a memory leak in X.
I put a top display up as I work, and I can see the memory used by X
growing. When X takes more than 90% of the memory as reported by top, I save
the file and quit. No more crashes, if I do that.

The crashing problem made me consider exporting my data and trying
Moneydance for Java. However, I could not find an export function in
gnucash. It will import Quicken files (QIF), but it does not seem to write
them. At the moment I seem stuck in gnucash. 

I wanted to used gnucash on a separate machine that my children do not use,
so I can actually get to the computer to pay me bills. I am trying to build
gnucash 1.4.8 from source on that machine and I have been having trouble. It
uses a lot of libraries and support software. It use many gnome features and
since I was building from source I had to install a lot of development
packages from the Mandrake CD. It also uses swig and g-wrap, which I am
trying to install from source. My current problem is swig can not find some
of its library files, although I can.


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Mike Procario			DOE-Division of High Energy Physics
Phone: 301-903-2890		Email: michael.procario at science.doe.gov
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