For a while now, i’ve been looking for a nice and feature filled personal finance application for Mac OS X. The only promising one i found was GNUCash, although it required X to run which resulted in it being very clunky to use. It was also a nightmare to install, with it typically pulling in lots of dependancies in MacPorts which in turn took up lots of disk space - not exactly a plentiful commodity on my Macbook.
Just as i thought all was lost, i found this rather interesting page on the GNUCash wiki, which describes how to compile GNUCash along with the native gtk port, which is great as in theory i would get a nice native version of GNUCash which would be a bit less clunky than the X version - great!
After a few minutes of trying to follow the instructions on the GNUCash wiki, i thought “surely this could be simpler?”. So i decided to check out my old friend MacPorts, which just happened to include support for the native gtk port. All you need to do is… well, run this from the terminal:
$ sudo port install gnucash +quartz
Sadly though, it wasn’t that easy. Soon after i kept bumping into compile issue on compile issue. I even modified the Portfile’s to apply patches to the associated library’s. I almost managed to get it working… i even got the loading screen trying to pop up… until i finally bumped into this:
dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _cairo_quartz_surface_create_for_cg_context Referenced from: /opt/local/lib/libgdk-quartz-2.0.0.dylib Expected in: flat namespace dyld: Symbol not found: _cairo_quartz_surface_create_for_cg_context Referenced from: /opt/local/lib/libgdk-quartz-2.0.0.dylib Expected in: flat namespace
Which safe to say, put the final nail in the coffin. Rather than spending even longer to try and fix this rather annoying linker issue, i gave up. After all, it was infinitely easier just to type this into my copy of Ubuntu Linux running in Parallels Desktop:
sudo apt-get install gnucash
… which left my with a hassle-free installation of GNUCash which actually worked properly. Although then again it was running in a vm window, but i guess that’s the price one has to pay for sanity.
Consequently i now know that no, it can’t be any simpler to install GNUCash with the native GTK backend in MacPorts. In addition i think i’ll wait till someone else iron’s out all the problems and makes a nice native GNUCash package for Mac OS X.
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