Gnucash 2.4 has been released and I’d like to install it in my OpenSuSE 11.3 system. It isn’t in any of the repositories that I have listed, although it might be in some repository I don’t know about. If it’s not in a repository, then I’ll have to build it from source.
I downloaded the source package and attempted to build it, starting with configure. I got as far as this:
configure: External QOF Disabled. Using Internal QOF Code.
checking dbi/dbi.h usability… no
checking dbi/dbi.h presence… no
checking for dbi/dbi.h… no
configure: error: Unable to find dbi/dbi.h
The perl-DBI package is installed, so that’s probably not what it’s looking for.
There doesn’t seem to be a perl-DBI development package, or at least none that I can find. Since my post I’ve learned that there’s a –disable-dbi option on configure that bypasses the error, though I don’t know the consequences of using it. However, with that option plus adding a few RPMs needed to satisfy dependencies, I finally managed to create a usable version of gnucash.
The consequence of using --enable-dbi is that you will able to use MySQL,sqlite3 and postgres sql to store your data instead of flat files that Gnucash uses now. If you do not want to store your data in some database and flat files are OK for you then I do not think it should be any problem.
This is from the announcement section of Gnucash
Major changes in the 2.4.0 release include;
In addition to the XML backend, Gnucash can now use a SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL database to store the data. This is a new implementation using libdbi. It supports all features including the business features. In order to build with this, add --enable-dbi to the configure command. In addition to the libdbi-dev package for your distribution, you will also need the appropriate DBD (libdbi driver) package for sqlite3, mysql or postgresql.