Building

Get the latest sources from Subversion and examine the README.svn file for notes on compiling gnucash, and the HACKING file for notes on hacking the code.

Here are the basic steps one might end up taking:

1. change to gnucash directory

 cd gnucash

2. generate the configure script

 ./autogen.sh 

3. look at configure options

 ./configure --help

4. run configure

 ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnucash \
    --enable-debug --enable-doxygen \
    --enable-error-on-warning --enable-compile-warnings \
    [--enable-ofx [...]]

5. compile and install

 make
 make install

6. run

 /opt/gnucash/bin/gnucash

Required Packages

See the README.dependencies file for library dependency notes.

Debian

On Debian, the packages you'll probably need are (among many others):

libgnomeui-dev
libofx-dev
libgsf-1-dev
libgtkhtml3.2-dev (3.6 or 3.8 will also do)
libgwrapguile-dev OR
guile-g-wrap (It compiles but doesn't run without this: "<unnamed port>: no code for module (g-wrap gw standard)")

Gentoo

Gentoos instructions can be found on Gnucash-svn installation on Gentoo.

Dapper Flight 5

On an fresh install of Ubuntu/Dapper, do the following to be able to compile trunk gnucash:

Install needed packages

Give the command below and let Dapper sort out which extra packages are needed.

sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev libofx-dev libgsf-1-dev \
libgtkhtml3.8-dev guile-g-wrap libltdl3-dev g-wrap doxygen \
libgsf-gnome-1-dev automake1.9 texinfo build-essential intltool \
libtool subversion libfinance-quote-perl

Create development tree

mkdir -p $HOME/development/gnucash
mkdir -p $HOME/unstable/gnucash

Check out gnucash trunk

cd $HOME/development/gnucash
svn checkout http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk gnucash

Compile gnucash

cd gnucash
./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=$HOME/unstable/gnucash \
   --enable-debug --enable-doxygen \
   --enable-error-on-warning --enable-compile-warnings

make all install

Start newly compiled gnucash

cd $HOME/unstable/gnucash/bin
./gnucash