Dennis Krul

Gnucash is the de-facto accounting software for Linux desktops. A couple of months ago a GTK2 version of the application was announced. Yesterday I decided to give it a testdrive.

My first challenge was to import transactions from my bank (Rabobank). Unfortately they don’t provide exports in QIF or OFX formats. So it’s not possible transactions into GnuCash directly. Fortunately I found a convertor tool: MGC. I was pleased to see that they offer a Linux version, but it works horribly. I decided to go the wine route and use the windows version instead.

A really nice feature of Gnucash2 is it’s ability to do bayesian matching between transactions, which means you only have to select the account for one transaction and it automatically sets the right account for other similar transactions as well. That saved me a lot of time when importing a couple of hundred transactions since june 2005. On a sidenote: The bayesian matching stuff only works on OFX files, not on QIF. A developer of the project told me the QIF importer still uses the old importer code. So OFX is currently the preferred format.

I’ve been running a mailserver for about 8 years now. And up until now there was really only one worthy opensource webmail client available: Squirrelmail. Although it’s fast and stable it’s showing it’s age.
I was very pleased to hear about a new AJAX-y web-2.0 *insert more buzzwords here* enabled webmail client called RoundCube (thanks qball!). It requires PHP and a database (currently mysql, postgresql and sqlite are supported) for user preferences. The project is still in it’s infancy, but it looks very promising.

I visited the LinuxWorld conference 2 weeks ago and visited the Sun/StorEdge stand (among others). I talked to one of the account managers for a while, was quite impressed by the Sun X4500 storage server (24TB storage in a 5U rackserver!), and finally signed up for a contest.

And guess what. Wednesday an account manager from Sun called me and told me i won an 4GB iPod nano! He came to my office on friday to deliver it. I’m really amazed by the slim size and weight of the thing. It’s really a nice piece of technology (I never seen such a device up close). Unfortunately I quickly became aware that applications like Rhythmbox don’t have iPod write support. Well you can enable it at compile time, but it’s still experimental. I don’t like the fact that you can’t just drop mp3’s on the thing and it picks them up. And ofcourse iPods don’t play ogg either, which is the format most of my collection is encoded in.

So I decided to put Rockbox on it, which is opensource firmware for a lot of popular portable music players like the iPod. And I love it! It’s very customizable, too. And now i can just upload music somewhere on the device and rockbox automatically picks them up, indexes the ID3 tags and plays them (gapless playback!). It works very good in combination with Rhythmbox, too.

I, for one, am a happy rockpod user.