ANNOUNCE: Fwd: GnuCash 2.4.10 released - How to get updated US Tax Info

[Alex Aycinena]

As Christian mentions in his 2.4.10 announcement, below, this release
contains updates that "reflect changes to US Income Tax Forms and
Schedules for 2011". These are not extremely significant changes but
if you are subject to US Income Tax reporting requirements and use
gnucash to aid in preparing your US tax returns, you should upgrade so
that your Tax Report reflects these latest updates.

If you are using Windows or a Mac, the announcement tells you where to
get the update.

If you are using another operating system (Linux, etc.), the easiest
way to get the update is to wait until it becomes available through
your normal package distribution mechanism. But sometimes there can be
significant delays between the gnucash release and its availability
through these normal distribution channels. And since tax time in the
US is upon us now, there is a way that you may be able to get just the
US Tax updates into your existing gnucash installation before the
2.4.10 release is available to you, if certain prerequisites apply to
your installation. See the instructions that follow Christian's
announcement:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de>
> To: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org, gnucash-user at gnucash.org, gnucash-announce at gnucash.org
> Cc:
> Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:16:44 +0100
> Subject: GnuCash 2.4.10 released
> GnuCash 2.4.10 released
>
> The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.4.10, the ninth bug
> fix release in a series of stable of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software.
> With this release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL
> or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac
> OSX.
>
>
> Getting GnuCash for Windows (Win32 binary)
>
> The Gnucash 2.4.10 Win32 setup executable
> http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/gnucash-2.4.10-setup.exe
> can be downloaded from Sourceforge. It will install everything needed to run
> GnuCash.
>
>
> Mac OSX binary
>
> The Gnucash 2.4.10 MacOSX package
> http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/Gnucash-Intel-2.4.10.dmg
> can be downloaded from Sourceforge as well.
>
>
> Getting GnuCash as source code
>
> If you want to compile GnuCash 2.4.10 for yourself, the source code can be
> downloaded from:
>
>    Sourceforge:
> http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnucash/gnucash-2.4.10.tar.bz2
>
> To compile GnuCash from the source code by yourself, you will need Gnome 2,
> guile, slib. In addition you will need swig if compiling from subversion.
>
>
> Changes
>
> Between 2.4.9 and 2.4.10, the following bugfixes were included:
>

(deleted)

>    Update txf.scm in stable branch to reflect changes to US Income Tax Forms

(deleted)

>

To upgrade the US Income Tax information on an existing gnucash installation:

Prerequisites: You must have at least 2.3.8, or later, installed for
the following to work. If not, THIS WON'T WORK, so don't do it. (If
you can't upgrade using your distribution's package manager to at
least this level, your only choice is to build from source.) You also
must have administrative/root privileges on your system.

1. Determine where gnucash files are installed on your system,
specifically the file: 'txf.scm'. For example, on my Fedora system, it
is located in '/usr/share/gnucash/scm/' and is owned by 'root'. The
location may be different for your distribution.

2. Exit gnucash if it is running. As 'root', locate and change the
name of the existing 'txf.scm' file to 'txf.scm.orig' noting its
ownership and permissions (su -; cd /usr/share/gnucash/scm; ls -al;
rename txf.scm txf.scm.orig. txf.scm; ls -al).

3. As your regular user, with your internet browser, go to
'http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/tags/2.4.10/src/tax/us/' and
right-click on and save 'txf.scm' somewhere (e.g.:
/home/user-name/Downloads).

4. As 'root', move the downloaded 'txf.scm' file to the location where
'txf.scm.orig' is located and make sure its ownership and permissions
are the same as the original file (mv
/home/user-name/Downloads/txf.scm /usr/share/gnucash/scm/txf.scm; ls
-al; chown root:root /usr/share/gnucash/scm/txf.scm; ls -al; chmod g-w
/usr/share/gnucash/scm/txf.scm; ls -al).

5. Restart gnucash and confirm that the new file is being used
properly by selecting Edit->Tax Report Options and confirming that the
dialog works properly. Specifically, test it by temporarily setting
Tax Type as 'Individual, ...' if it is not that already, selecting
'Income' for 'Accounts', selecting some random income account, if it
is not already selected as 'Tax Related', do so, scrolling down to
'Sched D Short/Long gain or loss' and selecting it, then scrolling the
lower area to see the 'Form Line Data' and if it says '2011 - now
1,2, or 3 via ...' everything is fine. Click 'Cancel' so that no
changes are made to your data from the test.

Note that if you have any difficulties you can exit gnucash, delete
the downloaded 'txf.scm', rename 'txf.scm.orig' back to the way it was
before and restart gnucash to be back where you were.

Also, if you do any upgrades to your existing installation after these
steps to a release that is less than 2.4.10 (say, for example, from
2.4.4 to 2.4.9), you will have to redo these steps.

Finally, I'll comment that although I reference Fedora above just
because that happens to be the distribution I use, my experience is
that the Fedora gnucash package maintainer is very timely in releasing
updates so that if you use Fedora, you probably won't have to do this.