Windows

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GnuCash on Microsoft Windows

This page collects various notes about running GnuCash on Microsoft Windows.

Q: Where is the binary installer?

A: The latest versions can be downloaded from the download page on the GnuCash website. Anyone who cares about their data should use the stable version found there. People looking to test new features - at the risk of running into extra bugs - could try the unstable version.

  • As it is not so easy to build GnuCash under Windows, a weekly build of the stable branch at http://code.gnucash.org/builds/win32/2.4/ is made available as well to test bugfixes.
  • To closely follow development on the unstable branch, which contains new features - and bugs - there are the nightly builds. Expect data loss if you try these though !

Q: Are there nightly builds?

A: Yes! For the unstable branch which contains new features (and potentially new bugs) there is an installer from nightly builds at http://code.gnucash.org/builds/win32/trunk/

Q: Which Windows versions are supported?

A: All versions starting with Windows XP are supported. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are supported as well. If you encounter any errors on Windows, please report them through Bugzilla. Not supported is Windows 98 and Windows 2000 (anymore, since 2.3.10). Sorry for that.

Q: Is it possible to compile GnuCash on Windows?

A: Yes. It's cumbersome, but possible. See the instructions on this page.

Q: Anything else?

To avoid making the installer file even bigger, some functionality is not available without further downloads and installations of software.

Finance::Quote

For online retrieval of price quotes, you will need to install Perl and Finance::Quote (F::Q). Download and install ActivePerl. ActivePerl versions before 5.16.3 may not deliver the latest version of F::Q (1.18 as of this writing). The 32-bit version is recommended, even on 64-bit Windows, but success has also been achieved running the 64 bit version under Windows XP Pro x64 SP2 with both GC 2.4.11 and 2.4.12(YMMV). If prompted, you don't have to provide contact details, just choose the MSI installer for your system. It is strongly recommended to use the default installation directory. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of ActivePerl, uninstall the old version and delete its directory before installing the new one. Once perl is installed, use the start menu item "Install Online Price Retrieval" from the GnuCash group to install the necessary Perl modules for F::Q and verify the setup.

On versions 2.2.6 and before, you will have to use ActivePerl 5.8. The menu item on older versions of GC is "Install Finance-Quote."

Notes

Error messages, Trace file

In the GnuCash application, all error messages are redirected to a trace file. There will be one trace file for each time GnuCash is run. For a user named "myname" these files are located in the folder

  • c:\Documents and Settings\myname\Local Settings\Temp (Windows XP) or
  • C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Temp (Windows Vista/7).

They are named

  • gnucash.trace.ABCDEF (GnuCash 2.2.9 and older) or
  • gnucash.trace.ABCDEF.log (GnuCash 2.4.0 and newer)

where the ABCDEF part is changed randomly on each start of gnucash. See also Tracefile.

If you experience crashes or unexpected behavior, check the latest of these files (or the one created when the problem started) and add all interesting-looking lines of that file to your error reports, at least the lines with the keywords WARNing and CRITical warning.

Determining the locale

When asked for the locale, take a look at the Regional Settings in your Control Panel and report the values found for "Standard and Formats", "Location" and "Language for non-Unicode programs".

Also, use this bug's attachment to determine the locale as used internally by gettext.

Problems, issues, comments

For any problem that occurs now, you should add a new section below.

Issues with older versions of GnuCash

In an effort to keep the information somewhat manageable this page will only gather issues with the current stable version of GnuCash. For historical reference, the older issues will be moved to a separate page.

If you experience issues with an older version of GnuCash, the first advice is normally to try again with the current stable version. There may however be situations where you need to revive an older version and in that case the information kept on the older issues page may be useful.

Known issues

Here is a list of the most often mentioned Windows issues. If you experience this problem, please check the respective bugzilla reports for potential workarounds.

Windows 7 64-bit - GnuCash fails to run

This is with GnuCash 2.4.3:

Starting GnuCash shows the splash screen and the tip of the day for a brief instant and then it disappears. To fix the problem, I did:

  1. Right-click on the GnuCash icon and select 'Run as Administrator'
  2. GnuCash starts up as expected
  3. Close GnuCash

After doing the above once, I can start GnuCash normally and it starts up properly.

Hopefully this helps someone. --Sketch 05:05, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Font problems

After upgrading to 2.2.1, people have reported font-related issues:

  • The tick/check mark in the Reconcile window may look like a "nondescript squiggle"
  • Register windows may open with all transactions scrolled out of sight (upwards)
  • Languages other than English show characters as a box of four zeros "0 0 0 0".

The reason appears to be that GnuCash is now referring to Windows to determine what fonts to use, and in both these cases is using the one specified for "Message Box", which defaults to Tahoma 8.

Changing to Tahoma 10 fixed both of these for me.

The procedure on WinXP is:

  1. Start -> Control panel or My Computer -> Control panel
  2. Appearance and Themes -> Display (or, if using the "Classic View", Display)
  3. Appearance
  4. Advanced
  5. Select "Message Box" from the drop-down
  6. Change as required (e.g. set to Tacoma 10 point)
  7. OK
  8. Apply

Fred 10:30, 22 August 2007 (EDT)

Is this still necessary when using GnuCash 2.2.2? andi5

I (piyo) confirmed that the above procedure is necessary for viewing Japanese on Windows XP with GnuCash 2.2.3 (2008-01-08):

  • Confirmed that working fonts are Arial UI Unicode, FixSys, System, Tahoma (including 8!), Terminal. Also for Japanese, MS P Gothic, MS P Mincho, MS UI Gothic, MS Gothic, MS Mincho fonts are working.
  • Confirmed that non-working fonts are Lucida Sans Unicode and Microsoft Sans Serif.

--Piyo 23:23, 5 February 2008 (EST)

Program hangs constantly

(GnuCash 2.4)

According to this bug report GnuCash can become unstable with some themes. The original reporter didn't remember which themes caused issues, but had no problems when using the "Unity" theme.

--GJanssens 2013-10-18

Logitech QuickCam conflicts

Some Logitech QuickCam software is incompatible with MSYS, and causes the install.sh script to randomly crash and create sh.exe.stackdump files. If you experience this problem, see the MSYS FAQ page or the MinGW mailing list for help.

Development Notes

A review of moving Gnucash to Guile 1.8

Todo

This section is intended mainly for developers to concisely specfiy what issues are open, assigned or closed (and can be removed then). 

[/]    AqBanking
[/]    Encoding issues (Bug)
[ ]    Randomness (Mail)
[W] R  GConf/ORBit2
[X]    Finance::Quote
[X] R  Compressed files (Mail)
[X] R  Documentation
[X]    LibOFX
[X] R  Text report crashers (Bug, Bug)
[X] R  Packaging

A lot more, fill me
X = done; W = workaround; / = in-progress, not-yet-done, needs-testing
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