Gnucash on Slackware 10.1: Success

[J. Milgram]

Mark Johnson <mrj001 at shaw.ca> wrote:

> Thanks for putting that up.  It's not easy to get gnucash running on 
> slackware.  I liked step one; it would have saved me a few days!

Fortunately I give up easier, so only lost a day :)

> I offer two additional tips.
> 
> Step 9 could be simpler.  The DB1 packages are still included with 
> Slackware 10.0 and 10.1.  Look in the pasture directory:
> ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.1/pasture/

Excellent suggestion, I didn't even think to look!
I made the change to the page.
 
> One other thing I personally did differently was: "make 
> DESTDIR=/sometmpdir install".  Then made that into a Slackware package 
> (complete with install directory and slack-desc file), and finally 
> installed the package.

Funny you should mention that - I just tried that out for the first time
with this gnucash install. It seemed to be a good idea because it gives
you an easy way to uninstall if you ever need to, and maybe other good
things happen too. The thing you have to watch out for, though, is that
some packages do "interesting things" when you make install, for example
the gnome-print install runs gnome-font-install. So when you do make
DESTDIR=/sometmpdir install, it generates a fontmap with bogus pathnames
that start with /sometmpdir, so you have to be sure to put the same
gnome-font-install line(s) in doinst.sh to recompile the fontmap when
your homemade Slackware package is installed. Guess how I came to learn
this. In the end I just installed directly without DESTDIR and didn't
worry about making the Slackware package.

I notice the Slackware 8.1 package gnome-print-0.36-i386-1 doesn't run
gnome-font-install in its doinst.sh, which may have explained the font
problems I was getting at run time ("Font face not found" etc.). There's
a lot I don't understand about this but I'm content to not know for
sure.

thanks again

Judah