I think there was more than one time that I felt lucky that I’ve been using a PowerPC Mac (Powerbook G4) and not a MacBook…that does sound like quite the headache. I’ve often wondered what the value is of being on a *nix-based system when all the best tools are inaccessible! But the work of porting is thankless and I’m sure the folkel at Fink giving it their all.

The yakshaving for ledger’s actually ended for me just this past weekend – I followed the FAQ instructions on going to CVS for unstable packages. My hard drive crashed the week before last, and my hard drive service peeps gave me a fresh install of Mac OS X 10.4, so I’ve since been able to get fink, gnuCash, ledger, ledger-el (for emacs) and bbdb all going. It took a bit of tinkering and waiting for the CVS to update…which was some of how I kept busy during Web Directions North sessions ^_^

…now comes the other fun part: learning how to use ledger! That’s what Toronto’s for (I’m looking at you, Sacha! )

As of June, 2006, GnuCash-1.8 does not work on Intel-based Macs.

Well, there’s my problem right there. Originally, I just went and used the package that showed up in FinkCommander (v 1.8) without thinking about it.

There’s a nifty guide here that outlines how to go about doing so (Unfortunately, the gnucash2 package still isn’t showing up in FinkCommander, despite the fact that gnucash2-docs is). Only thing about it is some of the dependencies listed are out of date, so I’ve got to check each one manually to see if / what version I’ve got installed. Other than that, it’s not so bad; it actually feels like I’m making progress! But damn, compiling all these dependencies sure does take a while… I’ll let you know how it goes once it’s done!

As part of becoming more GTD this year, I had resolved that I needed some sort of productive way to organize all my monetary transactions. I’ve been searching for the longest time for a decent bookkeeping / ledger (GUI) app for the longest time and all the ones I’ve come across so far were either too simple, too confusing, or too ugly. Liquid Ledger was almost there, but it couldn’t do double-entry accounting with it (I searched thoroughly though the help files and in their support forums, and couldn’t find anything about it), which was the real deal-breaker for me.

I finally came across gnucash, and the feature list seemed in line with everything I was looking for (the big one being double-entry accounting), so I thought I’d give it a go.

I found this article on how to get it set up on OS X with Fink, so I tried it out.

After several hours of compiling, it was finally ready. I typed /sw/bin/gnucash into Terminal, and X11 launched. A GUI window appeared; I was shaking in anticipation, thinking I had finally found what I had spent the better part of a week searching for. And then I got this alert:

“Application “GuppiPlugInSpec” (process 8523) has crashed due to a fatal error. (Bus error)
<Please visit the GNOME Application Crash page for more information>
[ Close ]

And then it quit. I was so annoyed that I just gave up. I have still to find my perfect personal finance app. It might’ve been GnuCash, but now I’ll never know… I’d gladly give it a second chance, if I could get it to work, that is. I just wish they had precompiled binaries for OS X; it’d really make my life a lot easier.

Now it’s been a few weeks later and after reading your post, I’ve got some new-found hope knowing someone else was able to install it successfully, so I tried launching it again today, and it doesn’t even open X11; I get Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: . What the heck does that mean!?!?!!!

I’ve practically given up. I just want it to work. Is that too much to ask?