Missing step in gnucash-2.4.0 for Kubuntu 10.10

[Geert Janssens]

On Saturday 25 December 2010, Paul Abrahams wrote:
> The missing steps that made gnucash work correctly were:
> 
> rm /usr/local/bin/gnucash
> ln -s /opt/gnucash/bin/gnucash /usr/local/bin/gnucash
> 
> as superuser, of course.  Now all is well and the gnucash command really
> does start up gnucash 2.4.
> 
I will indeed make gnucash run now, but you have also left a lot of files 
lingering in /usr/local/. These files may bite you in the future in unexpected 
ways.

GnuCash consists of many more files than just /usr/local/bin/gnucash. There 
are several files and directories in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/include, 
/usr/local/lib, /usr/local/libexec, /usr/local/share, and /usr/local/etc.

If gnucash was the first and only program you have installed in /usr/local/, 
you can easily solve this by removing the contents of each of these 
directories.

If you installed other programs in /usr/local, you will have to figure out 
which files belong to gnucash and remove those. You could compare the files in 
/usr/local/* with /opt/gnucash/* and remove the files that are in both 
directories.

The other (perhaps a bit counter intuitive) way to do it would be to build and 
install gnucash again in /usr/local and then uninstall it as the build system 
has intended.

So in steps to follow:

* cd [gnucash source directory]
* ./configure --prefix /usr/local [other options you used]
* make && make install
* make uninstall

A golden rule: if you install a program via "make install" in the default 
/usr/local, then use "make uninstall" to properly remove it. This is not 
necessary when using the /opt/gnucash prefix as that would ensure that all 
files end up in one clearly defined subdirectory. It doesn't hurt to use make 
uninstall in that case as well though.

Other alternatives to avoid this mess would have been to learn about 
checkinstall which is a great little tool that interacts with your package 
management system during make install, so your package management system knows 
what got installed. It works on rpm and deb based systems.

> I hope that 2.4 makes it into the Kubuntu repositories soon.  That would
> make all this bull**** vanish.
> 
This is why the GnuCash downloads page recommends to stick with the version 
that ships with your distribution.

> It would also be nice if the gnucash.org website had instructions for Linux
> as it does for Windows and MacOS, especially since the gnucash developers
> are, I assume, Linux fans.

There are build instructions in the GnuCash wiki for several distro's. If 
these instructions aren't adequate, you are free to improve them. Except for 
the start page, the wiki is a public document that can be modified by any 
registered user.

I really encourage you to check out the instructions for (K)Ubuntu and make 
any corrections based on your experience.

Geert

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