Using Linux

I’ve been planning on doing some reorganization of my hard disk partitions for quite a while now. The occasion of the release of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn will prompt me to actually get it done.

I think I will do it this way on the 40GB IDE drive:

• hda1 Windows XP
• hda2 /home (accessible by Windows with Ext2 IFS)
• hda3 Ubuntu
• hda4 openSUSE

I’ve got an old 4.3 GB IDE disk that I’ll use for a swap drive too.

The first step will be to move my current /home directory to a newly created /home partition as recommended by Pelo in #ubuntu. I found a guide to moving /home on the Ubuntu Blog. I’ll then be able to just reinstall an OS and point it to /home during the installation. I just hope it’s not that much hassle getting things like VMware set back up.

I’ve only given GnuCash a week, but I’m afraid that is enough to discourage me.

Quicken is one of those indispensable Windows programs to me. I’ve been using it for about six years and with every transaction entered, my financial history becomes more valuable to me. I really want to find a personal finance program that natively runs in Linux to use instead, but I need the same functionality.

I remember trying GnuCash years ago and it was very barebones software. It has improved, I can tell. The double-entry accounting part of it was not hard to get used to. Instead, the first hint I wouldn’t like it very much was that the reports were not able to be modified on the fly (i.e., changing the date range or accounts to include). I like looking at graphical representations of my data from different angles and through different lenses without much hassle. I have a feeling that I could get all the reports I want if I customize them all ahead of time. I’m not sure I’m willing to step into that learning curve right now.

Today I couldn’t find a way to fix the problem that the General Ledger only scrolls back one month. In Quicken I quite often scroll up to view old transactions because the old transactions are often very similar to current ones. I searched in the Preferences for an option to change this behavior, but I could not find a simple solution.

For now I’ll continue to use Quicken through VMware Server and a virtual Windows XP installation. I have subscribed to the GnuCash feed to keep abreast of changes that could change my mind, though.

Back in January when having problems with my PC I began using Linux primarily for my everyday tasks. After two weeks of using various distributions I decided that I could get by pretty much without booting into Windows all the time.

This blog aims to document my learning experience with various distros and software in the Linux community. I’ve been going strong for about three months, but there still are many frustrations. I rarely have the expertise to post solutions for anyone on a forum, but I am always grateful for the help I receive. While this is basically a log for myself so that I don’t forget things I’ve been doing, I hope something I write here may help someone with an issue or two at some point. It’s all in the spirit of user-to-user support.

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