Switching from Quicken to gnucash.

[Manfred Usselmann]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:16:27 +0200
Charles Stroom <charles at stremen.xs4all.nl> wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:56:05 +0200
> Manfred Usselmann <usselmann.m at icg-online.de> wrote:
> 
> > Maybe it would better to install Quicken in a virtual machine (E.g. 
> > Vmware Server oder QEMU). Inside your VM you could use Windows as
> > OS or your current Linux/Wine combination. Whenever you upgrade your
> > Linux system your Quicken system would remain untouched. And there
> > would be no need to update it since you use it just to access your
> > historical Quicken data. You could even burn the virtual disk file
> > to cd or dvd as backup and would then be able to transfer it to
> > another PC. 
> 
> Actually, I have quicken under vmware 4.5 as well and I used it until
> wine became stable enough.  But when I bought my new PC a couple of
> months ago, vmware 4.5 had problems to install.  Upgrading to vmware 6
> would have cost an odd US$ 200, which is a bit too much for only 2 PC
> programs I really need (quicken and an old Ashlar's Drawingboard).

No need to buy a VMware Workstation licence. Vmware Server is available
free of charge from the VMware web site and should be absolutely
sufficient for your purposes. As I said there is also QEMU which is GPL.

> Fortunately, I got vmware 4.5 to work again, so for the time being,
> there is no problem.  I am anticipating a future, hence my eyes on
> gnucash. 

My suggestion to use a virtual maschine was meant to give you a viewer
for your historical data while you start using GnuCash so that you
don't speed a lot of effort to import your old data into GnuCash.

> The native system on my PC is Linux, avoiding M$soft as much
> as possible.

Thats why I suggested to use Wine inside your VM.
 
Manfred