Solo Technology

Rich is pondering a switch to Linux. I was participating in comments there, but got too wordy and decided to fall-back to here and lob over a trackback for the next salvo.

I’ve done the full-time Linux thing a few times over the years with varying levels of success. [You'd see some thoughts and some remembrances as you browse through my Linux tagged posts]. I have to confess I’ve pondered making the switch back a few times this year, but talked myself out of it each time. Currently, my biggest concern is how to handle all my business stuff that I still do in QuickBooks. I mentioned this in a comment over at Rich’s blog and got a couple of the usual old replies, “Use Wine” or “use GnuCash” or “Look into CodeWeavers stuff”. *sigh*

My secondary concern is quite a bit more minor. I work from home a lot and often access windows server shares directly over the VPN for editing / development. So… I’d have to audition new favorite editors (amazing how spoiled I’ve become over the last few years by color syntax hiliting and bracket matching!). I don’t think the networking issues will amount to much, I’ve beat that demon in the past. And hey, I can still use rdesktop/tsclient and just doing everything remotely. How many ASP developers can claim they do all their editing with vi?

Unless something’s dramatically changed recently, wine will not get the job done. Granted, I haven’t tried in well over a year… but at that time, CodeWeavers couldn’t either. In looking tonight, it appears some progress has been made in getting QuickBooks 2004 running with CodeWeavers. Up to the “Bronze” level now. What’s a bronze level mean?

The bronze is awarded to applications that install and run, and that can accomplish some portion of their fundamental mission. However, bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers not depend on their functionality.

Some portion of fundamental just probably isn’t going to make me grin.

So what about GnuCash? Well, maybe there’s something to check out there. 2 or 3 years ago I was very underwhelmed. I mean, to be clear, if I was just worried about checkbook balancing I’d simply use OpenOffice.org’s Calc. To me, that’s not enough to run a business. I want simple/useful ways to manage my clients, their projects, and their balances. I want to be able to generate and email invoices and reminders. Online banking is a plus but I reckon I can live without now that I’m not doing Solo Technology full time anymore.

Major issue? No import from QB to GnuCash (on the wish-list though). Ouch.

Last time around, I did it all with VMware. Installed VMware and a copy of Windows 2000 workstation from my MSDN account. Worked just fine and was tedious as all hell to have to essentially boot up a machine to spend 10 minutes doing book-keeping.

Right now I’m leaning towards converting my old laptop, currently running xubuntu, to windows 2000 (pretty sure I still have that MSDN cd still) and moving over my outlook and QuickBooks data to it. Not the ideal solution (how well will QuickBooks run on a p2 366?) but as long as I keep it backed up it’d probably work while I beat my main machine into submission. Backing up would be key as that laptop drive has to be at least 7 years old if not more…

Or maybe I’ll keep pondering.

7 Responses to “Pondering Linux”

1. Rich G. on September 8th, 2006 8:25 pm
   

   Company payroll for my employees is done with Remote Desktop and I can’t do that properly under linux so I’d be using linux for the ego of using it I guess… I dunno that I’m up for a linux switch yet, even a practice run if I know going in that I won’t be able to do something trivial like pay people if I were to switch. *sigh*
   I’ve wanted to be a linux user for ages now… but I’m starting to believe it’s just not in the cards.

2. Chris on September 8th, 2006 8:41 pm
   

   Not sure I follow the remote desktop thing. Primary use of my little laptop is remote desktop to windows machines at the office. It works flawlessly (that’s rdesktop. tsclient puts the pretty gui front-end on it).

   And isn’t ego our usual motivation?

3. Rich G. on September 8th, 2006 9:42 pm
   

   Ugh, now there’s palm considerations I need to look into as well. I was threatened with lots of pain and suffering if I attempted to use linux to access our network by the SA. He gave reasons that sound like sound reasons so I’m agreeing with them.

4. Chris on September 8th, 2006 9:52 pm
   

   Palm sync worked for me a few years ago (in a fit of madness. I’ve since gone back to Pocket PC’s and I suspect I’ll be hosed with *nix).

   I’d be very curious to hear about why you shouldn’t use linux to remote desktop into your corp network. I won’t (shouldn’t!) attempt to dissuade you, but I bet he fed you F.U.D. and I’m just simply curious to hear what the latest approach is.

5. Chris on September 8th, 2006 10:39 pm
   

   Ya know… I hadn’t really thought about the PocketPC syncing thing. Hmm…

6. Vox on September 8th, 2006 11:56 pm
   

   Rich: You can do rdesktop from linux to windows or the other way around with no problem. Whatever reasons your sysadmin gave you are bullshit, if related to rdesktop itself…if it’s something else, I’d need to know what to tell you if it’s true or not.

   Chris: You can move your data from QB to GnuCash…I don’t know how (never used QB), but there’s a common format in there somewhere that works perfectly with both programs. As for syncing PPC…it works well, unless your PC is amd64…synce is very very broken in 64bit, and it doesn’t work But on 32bit linux, no problems at all, as far as I remember.

7. » pingback » QuickBooks to GnuCash » Solo Technology on September 9th, 2006 9:43 pm
   
   

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