One of the primary things
that people do with their computers is keeping track of their personal
finances. And primarily, balancing their checkbooks. Most former
Windows users probably used Quicken and say to themselves \”Where is
quicken for Linux\”. Well, there are a few choices in the Linux world
and one of them is called Moneydance.

You can get Moneydance from href=\"http://seanreilly.com/java/moneydance/\">http://seanreilly.com/java/moneydance/ or from download.cnet.com.
And it is available for download, but does cost $20 to register.

In order to run Moneydance you will need to have Java installed on
your computer. The Java that seems to work best for Linux and
Moneydance can be found at href=\"http://seanreilly.com/java/moneydance/getjava.html\">http://seanreilly.com/java/moneydance/getjava.html.
Please take a look at this, if you are running Mandrake and have
trouble using the IBM JRE href=\"http://seanreilly.com/java/moneydance/support.html#ibmmandrake\">Mandrake
libpthreads problem.

Get the Linux Version and you are set. One of the nice things about
Moneydance, is that if you are a 2 OS household, you can run it in many
different platforms since it is written in Java. If you want to do
this, make sure you download both the Moneydance and the Java Runtime
for each OS

Once you have downloaded your Moneydance and Java JRE, it is a
simple matter of installing and setting up the software. As always,
you will need to be logged in as root to do this.


> su
Password: XXXXXX
# cd /usr/local
# tar -zxvf /path/to/files/moneydance.x.xx.tgz
# tar -zxvf /path/to/files/jre-x.x.xxx.tgz

The above steps will untar the 2 files into the /usr/local
directory. This is the directory where you should install most
additional programs. Once you have done that we need to make a couple
of other changes before we are done. First of all the JRE will extract
out into a directory called jre-x-x-xx depending on the version. This
is OK, but we want to add a link to that so if we change the version
later, we dont have to edit other the path every time. The second is
to go in and edit Moneydance to tell it where it is and where the JRE
is


# cd /usr/local
# ln -s jre-x-x-xx jre
# cd moneydance

Here is where it gets tricky. Now because it is hard but because it
involves editing a file. In Linux there are a lot of choices to edit
with. Some people like VI, some like Emacs, some like other things. For
this article I am going to suggest pico. It is a simple editor and most
people ought to have it installed. If you dont, or if you have an
editor you like, use that to edit the file
/usr/local/moneydance/moneydance and change the following lines.


# Change the line below so that it refers to the directory where
# you installed the moneydance.jar and license.jar files
MONEYDANCE_LOCATION=/usr/local/moneydance

# You are probably much better off just leaving the \’jre\’ part
alone,
# and only modifying the path so that it points to the \’jre\’
program.
JAVA_EXE=/usr/local/jre

Remember that link we created, that is why we can use /usr/local/jre
instead of the original path of /usr/local/jre-x-x-xxx. Now if we
update the JRE, and re link /usr/local/jre to the new jre-x-x-xx
directory, we won\’t have to re-edit Moneydance. One last thing you may
want to do is put Moneydance on the path. To do this we are going to
create another link in /usr/local/bin.


# ls -s /usr/local/moneydance/moneydance /usr/local/bin

Now we should be able to run Moneydance from the command prompt
anywhere. but make sure you log out as root first.


# exit
> moneydance &

Now you are off and running. If you have Quicken, you can export
your old data files and import them into Moneydance. One thing to watch
for is that with Moneydance you have to remember to save your changes,
unlike Quicken, which AutoSaved them for you. It\’s a new world but
Moneydance can help you to get one step closer to a Microsoft free
desktop