RiderX

The OSX/ Parallels/ Ubuntu/ Gnucash combination continues to be a real headache. Every month I do billing. Every month I walk over to the office of a friend that works next door and complain about how aweful OSX, Parallels, or Gnucash are.

The process typically starts with me sipping some coffee and running a bunch of perl scripts to determine billable time from a postgresql database containing helpdesk ticket data from Request Tracker. I save these text reports to give to customers along with invoices I create in gnucash.

When I fire up macfusion (to access the system where I run the request tracker reports) and have a webdav mount in OSX, the system typically gets all moody and requires a reboot. So my frustration level rises slightly. Reboot okay, log in to request tracker system, setup macfusion mounts, setup webdav mounts, fire up parallels, login to Ubuntu under parallels and fire up gnucash. This is a process I typically need to carry out a few time while trying to do my billing.

It’s pretty frustrating. I’ve tried to get gnucash up under macports without success.

Now I’m trying using fink. Fingers crossed.

The OSX/ Parallels/ Ubuntu/ Gnucash combination continues to be a real headache. Every month I do billing. Every month I walk over to the office of a friend that works next door and complain about how aweful OSX, Parallels, or Gnucash are.

The process typically starts with me sipping some coffee and running a bunch of perl scripts to determine billable time from a postgresql database containing helpdesk ticket data from Request Tracker. I save these text reports to give to customers along with invoices I create in gnucash.

When I fire up macfusion (to access the system where I run the request tracker reports) and have a webdav mount in OSX, the system typically gets all moody and requires a reboot. So my frustration level rises slightly. Reboot okay, log in to request tracker system, setup macfusion mounts, setup webdav mounts, fire up parallels, login to Ubuntu under parallels and fire up gnucash. This is a process I typically need to carry out a few time while trying to do my billing.

It’s pretty frustrating. I’ve tried to get gnucash up under macports without success.

Now I’m trying using fink. Fingers crossed.

Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Pro. Let me tell you that Leopard represents a serious change from the various versions of Linux I’ve been using for the last 15 years. While the UI is overall pretty nice, many things are not well thought out and are overly complex.

The real purpose of this post is my big problems with gnucash. If you’ve not heard of it, GnuCash is a free software accounting package. It’s an adequate replacement for quickbooks, that I’m addicted to in my business.

I’ve been fighting with it for a week now. The MacPorts gnucash port won’t build because of several prerequisites which fail. I bought parallels, in hopes that I could just fire up ubuntu and run it under there. Fat chance. Parallels seems to be a big piece of crap. I’ve never had good experiences with swsoft. I wish I’d saved my money and bought VMWare fusion.