getting started on OS X

[John Ralls]

> On May 3, 2017, at 8:32 PM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Eric, 
> Welcome to gnucash. 
> First off, gnucash in general shouldn't be crashing; is it consistently crashing in the same place, or is it in different places? I seem to recall seeing something about trouble with setting up aqbanking in recent times, and you may be hitting that. 
> 
> Second, when gnucash crashes, you will get the message you report, so that is expected behavior. This is described in the FAQ. FAQ - GnuCash  
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> As for online access, I have used gnucash for over a decade. I never used the online interactive features, but I have imported downloaded qif and ofx files consistently without problems. There are extensive discussions about this on the list that can further inform you. 
> Using Brew should not be necessary, but someone else might have better information. 
> Cheers,David 
> 
> 
>  On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 3:45, Eric Theise<erictheise at gmail.com> wrote:   Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm hoping GnuCash will replace the increasingly abysmal Quicken in my
> life. I've installed the latest disk image on my OS 10.12.4 system and
> seemingly successfully imported a .qif file, but I have questions.
> 
> So far I find the sof tware crashes frequently. Upon restarting, I get the
> "GnuCash could not obtain the lock for file:[url]" message and am
> proceeding with "Open Anyway". I presume this is my best option?
> 
> I am unclear about how much functionality I should expect from Online
> Banking. I have checking, savings, and credit card accounts with major US
> banks and I would like to be able to fetch transactions periodically. I am
> unclear about how to set up this up.
> 
> When I "Start AqBanking Wizard"
> - "Create User" crashes the program. Utterly.
> - "Create Account" gives me "Select Backend" window with an empty dropdown
> list of "Backend"s to choose from. This seems wrong.
> 
> I did not think it would be necessary but I tried installing aqbanking via
> Homebrew. It seems to have made no difference, and while the page at
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/AqBanking talks about using aqhbci-tool, the
> version I installed via brew only surfaces aqhbci-tool4 which does not take
> the same arguments.
> 
> I do not know how to proceed and would appreciate any suggestions or
> pointers, thanks.
> 

It crashes for me, too, in AQBanking's setup on pressing New User. That's an AQBanking bug.

The easiest workaround would be to download GnuCash 2.6.15 which uses an older version of AQBanking, set up your online accounts, and then switch back to 2.6.16.

But before you bother you should make sure that your banks use OFX DirectConnect. Many use OFX WebConnect and AQBanking doesn't; in those cases you'll have to download OFX/QFX or QIF files (not QXF) from the website and import them using File>Import.

Regards,
John Ralls