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Gnucash for OSX Quartz

Prerequisites:

Gnucash of OSX Quartz requires MacOSX 10.5 (Leopard), MacOSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), or MacOSX 10.7 (Lion). It will not work on 10.4 (Tiger) because some of the libraries on which it depends now use features introduced in 10.5.

Installation and Upgrade:

To install Gnucash, open the disk image file you downloaded and simply drag Gnucash from there to the Applications folder (or anywhere else you like).

To upgrade Gnucash, do the same thing, but if you're going to install it to the same place as your old version and like me you only restart your computer when Software Update makes you do it, you'll first need to quit the dbus-daemon that the last run of Gnucash left behind. You can do that with Applications:Utilities:Activity Monitor. Find dbus-daemon in the list (there's a search box in the upper-right corner), highlight it, and press the red "quit" button. If you've restarted since the last time you ran Gnucash there's no need to do this (and you won't find dbus-daemon in Activity Monitor).

Finder will ask if it's OK to replace the existing Gnucash with the new one. You can either replace it or not; Gnucash is entirely self-contained and you can have as many copies of it on your system as you like -- just don't try to run more than one at a time.

If you are upgrading from a version of Gnucash older than 2.3.9, please run the "Update Dirs" application in the dmg. This will convert your online banking setup to work with the new version of AqBanking and will copy your .gnucash directory to the more Mac-appropriate Library/Application Support/Gnucash.

When you first open GnuCash.app, it will create a link from the bundle Resources folder to /Library/Gnucash-2.4. It will do this automatically, and no authentication is required if your userid has permission to administer the computer (set in System Preferences>Accounts).

Installing Finance::Quote

You can install Finance::Quote by double-clicking the FinanceQuote Update applet in the dmg. It's a bit painful, especially if you're on Lion and don't already have XCode installed.

You'll need to be logged in with an administrator account ("Allow user to administer this computer" is checked in System Preferences->Accounts for the user).

You'll also need to have Developer Tools (Tiger or Leopard) or XCode (Snow Leopard and Lion) installed. It's available as an optional install on your installation DVD or for Lion users, as a free download from the App Store. In the latter case, you must also install the command line tools: Open XCode Preferences, select "Downloads", and click the "Install" button next to "Command Line Tools". Close XCode.

FinanceQuote Update runs a script in a Terminal window. You'll need to switch to that window (CMD-Tab if it isn't visible) and enter your password at the prompt to allow it to write to the system Perl directory. The script will ask a bunch of questions. You can just accept the defaults to all of them (just hit "return" for each one). If there was a good way to suppress those questions, we'd do that.

Documentation:

Both the Gnucash Help system and the Gnucash Guide are provided in HTML format. They will open in your default browser when you select the appropriate item in the Help menu. Appropriate sections of help will be similarly opened when you click on a Help button in a dialog box.

Known Issues:

• Gnucash is not a native Mac application: It is a Gtk+ application which has been recompiled to run on OSX. Accordingly, some features to which Mac users are accustomed aren't supported. Some of these are non-menu-based keyboard shortcuts (key bindings; you can adjust them as you like in the gtkrc file), input methods, and Universal Access.

• An instance of dbus is started by the application startup script, but dbus isn't designed to be run that way, so it doesn't shut down when you close the application. When Gnucash starts up again, it will kill any instances of dbus which are running from the same path, but if you move Gnucash.app or are switching between stable and development versions, you may wind up with more than one instance. You can clean out the running dbus-daemons by either issuing "killall dbus-daemon" at a command line or by telling it to quit from /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor. Note that if you want to delete Gnucash.app, you'll need to kill the running instance of dbus-daemon first or you'll get "file in use" errors from Finder.

• As of Gnucash 2.3.9, Gnucash's configuration files are in $HOME/Library/Application Support/Gnucash instead of $HOME/.gnucash so that they're visible with Finder. GConf and AQBanking still have their configuration files in $HOME/.gconf, $HOME/.gconfd, and $HOME/.aqbanking (Note that 2.3.8 and previous used an older version of aqbanking which kept its config files in $HOME/.banking)

• The only libdbi module included is for SQLite. If you need either the MySQL or Postgresql modules, you will have to build them yourself and install them into Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/lib/dbd. For instructions, see MacOSX/Quartz.

• The first time a window is opened in the Aqbanking setup wizard, it's too small and the resize triangle is hidden. It's there, just click on where it should be and drag the window to an appropriate size. After you've done that once, Gnucash should remember it forever after.

• Aqbanking's chipcard facility isn't included. This may be added in the future if we can get it to work.

• There have been two bug reports about problems with importing OFX and MT940 data. (This is in addition to the HBCI issue noted under "Updates in 2.4.4.1".

OSX Revision History

Updates in 2.4.11

• Nothing specific to OSX. See the general release notes.

Updates in 2.4.10

• Updated Gtk+ to version 2.24.9

Updates in 2.4.9

• Nothing specific to OSX. See the general release notes.

Updates in 2.4.8

• Nothing specific to OSX. See the general release notes.

Updates in 2.4.7-2

• Gnucash now supports Lion (MacOSX 10.7), thanks to an upgrade of Gtk+ to 2.24.6

Updates in 2.4.7

• Fixed a bug which prevented most keybboard accelerators (shortcuts) from working.
• Now using aqbanking 5.0.10

Updates in 2.4.6

• Now using aqbanking 5.0.6, which corrects a bug preventing import of MT940 files and works with the new OFX import format at ofxhome.com
• Fixed the menu integration in windows opened after launch.
• Fixed the windows menu so that it doesn't have extra entries or extra separator lines.
• Fixed some internal bugs that were spewing error messages into the log file.
• Unfortunately, DBus launch with launchd had to be withdrawn. If you downloaded Gnucash-Intel-2.4.6.dmg and Gnucash won't launch correctly on your system, please download Gnucash-Intel-2.4.6.1.dmg. PPC Users: It never appeared to work on PPC, so the original package doesn't include it.

Updates in 2.4.5

• Nothing specific to OSX. See the general release notes.

Updates in 2.4.4.1

• Fixed an omission in the bundle which caused the AQBanking setup wizard to crash when working with HBCI users.

Updates Since 2.4.3

• Gtk+ is upgraded to 2.24.1. This is the final stable series of Gtk+2, and is necessary to prepare Gnucash to migrate to Gtk+3 in version 2.6.

Updates Since 2.4.1

• Nothing specific to OSX. See the general release notes.

Updates Since 2.4.0

• Gnucash on OSX now provides Aqbanking 5 with a Gtk setup wizard. That makes the bundle size about 1/3 smaller because we no longer need to include the Qt frameworks.
• Better handling of the language list, so that English will work well in any location on the list, for any variety of English. The Gtk translations are included so that "stock" buttons will be translated.

Updates Since 2.2.9

• Gnucash.app now uses Gtk+-2.20.1, which addresses many usability problems with earlier versions. In particular, mouse cursor placement in the register is much better.
• AQBanking uses a new Qt4-based wizard which should be more stable than the ported Qt3 wizard of previous releases.
• Keyboard menu accelerators and key bindings are now more mac-like.
• Cut, Copy, and Paste now work in the register pages!
• The untranslated strings in the Gnucash and Window menus have been mostly translated, though there are a couple of languages missing because Google Translation doesn't know them. If yours is one of them, by all means send me a translation (UTF-16, please) and I'll add it in.
• Printing works!
• Gnucash will now run from paths which include spaces.
• The Gnucash configuration files are now stored in $HOME/Library/Application Support/Gnucash instead of $HOME/.gnucash. This allows them to be seen with Finder and edited with TextEdit.
• AqBanking and Gwenhywfar are updated to far more recent versions from the ancient versions previously included. This requires updating any aqbanking configuration files.
• These changes require running Update Dirs.app, located in the DMG, to migrate to this version from Gnucash 2.3.8 or Gnucash 2.2.9.
• Gnucash now installs its link in /Library so that authentication isn't needed at first launch if your userid is allowed to administer the computer.
• There is a convenient applet provided to install/update Finance::Quote.
• Gwenhywfar plugins are now in the bundle (Thanks to Frank Beslmeisl for pointing this out).
• Hardcoded paths to perl libraries have been removed, so Finance::Quote installation will work even if you don't have the same perl version installed on your system that was used for the build system.
• Localization now follows the settings in System Preferences, with a couple of issues thanks to Gettext.

License and Included Binaries:

Gnucash is licensed under the Gnu General Public License Version 2, a copy of which can be found in the file LICENSE in this directory and in each bundle's Contents folder. There is also a file "Sources" which lists the several libraries included in the bundle upon which Gnucash depends along with their home webpages where you may find more licensing information and source downloads. A few of the libraries require patches to compile on OSX; all of those patches have been submitted as bugs to the respective libraries, but you'll find them at github.com/jralls/gnucash-on-osx/patches if you're really curious.

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