Gentoo

Gnucash SVN installation on Gentoo

This is written for people who do not know Gentoo's mechanism for installing unofficial ebuilds; if you know about PORTDIR_OVERLAY things, you will also know which steps to skip. (On the other hand you can make this steps twice, it doesn't matter. ;-))

Note that this installation will destroy any gnucash-1.8.x versions, because of overwriting some files, especially the gnucash binary in /usr/bin/gnucash. It is suggested to deinstall gnucash-1.8.x first.

If you need support for installing both, please tell me, I can figure out what to do to have them both.

Note: If you have any errors during configure or build, and it doesn't come to an end, please send me the last important lines to my email below. I will then update the ebuild until it works.

Installation instructions

Do the following as root:

1. Create the directory for gnucash-svn ebuild and change into it.

 mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/app-office/gnucash-svn
 cd /usr/local/portage/app-office/gnucash-svn

2. Download the ebuild from the gentoo bugs.

 wget http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=76978 -O gnucash-svn-20060112.ebuild

The version number for now does not say which version of svn you install, you install always the current version available via svn. Double-check [Gentoo Bug#118862] to ensure you're getting the latest attached version of the ebuild.

3. Create digest

 ebuild gnucash-svn-20060112.ebuild digest

4. Now you have the ebuild, so you need to make portage to use it, if you havent done before:

 echo "PORTDIR_OVERLAY=\"/usr/local/portage\"" >> /etc/make.conf

or you can edit the file with any editor to set this variable.

5. gnucash-svn is marked as unstable ~x86. If you have x86 (stable) in your /etc/make.conf, so enable ~x86 for gnucash-svn

 mkdir -p /etc/portage/
 echo "app-office/gnucash-svn ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

Thats all.

Oh, wait a moment. You have now the ebuild for gnucash-svn. Any install and update will be done with

 emerge gnucash-svn

At the first usage it will install gnucash currently svn version. There are updates nearly every day, so if you need the last you simply rerun

 emerge gnucash-svn

This keeps you up to date.

enjoy! ;-)

Gnucash-1.9.0

If you just want gnucash for gnome2, you can use the developers 1.9.0 version. This is available at [Gentoo Bug#122337]. The steps to use the ebuild are the same, as for gnucash-svn. (Use /usr/local/portage/app-office/gnucash/gnucash-1.9.0.ebuild as target location for your file.) Going this way will automaticaly remove your 1.8.x installation - only if you are using unstable (~x86).

Speeding up

Gnucash takes a long time to build. You can speed it up if you use the ccache feature, where allready built things will be stored in a cache and we will only rebuild new things or things where the configuration has changed.

Troubles with goffice?

Today I noticed that the last update makes troubles building goffice related things. This depends on gnucash, which finds goffice from a previous gnucash-svn installation and things there is a native goffice installed.

If you have the same problem simple deinstall gnucash-svn and reinstall it, but make a package before, in case your update build fails:

 quickpkg gnucash-svn
 emerge -C gnucash-svn && emerge gnucash-svn

In case building fails, you can restore the old version of gnucash-svn with

 emerge -k gnucash-svn

If that doesn't help you, please tell me.

- Martin <martin.klaffenboeck@gmx.at>