Help installing gnucash 1.6.1

[Greg Woods]

Bill Gribble wrote:

> RPM-based distributions make it difficult to install multiple versions
> of a library, though; you will probably not be able to install a new
> version of libgal without removing the old one, which will break all
> your existing Gnome programs.  There's no technical reason you can't
> have both versions installed, it's just the way they are packaged
> doesn't acknowledge that the different major versions are essentially
> totally different libraries and wants to replace the older one with
> the newer one, so the packages conflict.

I have to second this. I tried for a week to get an RPM-based version of
gnucash 1.6.1 to install. I even created a separate partition on my Red
Hat 6.2-based main desktop system, and installed RH 7.1 there, for the
sole purpose of playing with GnuCash, knowing how many libriaries were
going to have to be modified and knowing that I could change anything I
liked without breaking anything else I cared about, and I *still* never
got it to work. I never did succeed in finding libgal8 anywhere, for
instance. I wouldn't even want to think about trying all this on a
system that had other applications I depend on. I finally gave up, and
installed from source, and even that was hard. The gnome-print package I
installed, for instance, didn't include a printConf.sh file, so I got to
figure out how the whole gnome-config system worked in order to get the
GnuCash configure script to complete successfully. Fortunately, I have a
stubborn streak, and once I got that far into the project, I wasn't
about to go back. Were it not for the fact that lack of an accounting
package for Linux was the main reason why I still kept Windoze around, I
never would have been willing to put in this much effort. But I heard a
lot of good things about 1,6.1, and so far, I have not been disappointed
with the results.

I'd carry Bill's advice one step further: unless you have the exact same
platform as the developers do, if you want to play with a program that
is as complex as GnuCash that is under such active development and
requires the latest and greatest versions of everything in order to
work, you pretty much have to compile from source. This also has the
advantage that if there is a new feature you really want that they are
working on (such as, in my case, improved check printing), then you are
in an excellent position to help with testing.

--Greg