Grisbi - Business Accounting For Linux

Need something as if it's a Quickbooks Pro™ for Linux? Go look at Grisbi. Of course, the most sound advice I can give you is to consider the Gnucash project because it is most used, or do all your books in OpenOffice spreadsheets. Still, however, if you want to see a sensational up-and-comer, Grisbi is something I have my bets on. The problem I have with Gnucash is that I'm still scratching my head, wondering why it's an updated project but still uses an older GTK widget-set. That sort of makes me nervous. Instead, Grisbi uses the more modern GTK2+ widget-set.

Here's one of its screenshots. The project is GPL, appears to be written with GCC (C language), uses GTK2+ widget-set (so it works well in GNOME), and was originally started in France, I think I infer. It has been ported to German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and now English.

Please note, however, that this is still a 0.5x release as of 2006-Apr-22, and not quite a 1.0 release. Your financial contributions can probably elevate your status for the devs on the project to consider your improvements or repair bugs, although they are handling this with and without funding. (I always like to give a plug for funding because, hey, I'm a programmer too.)

Based on the quality of this thing, I expect it to be a fast-rising app in a future Linux, perhaps to the nature of OpenOffice?

In Ubuntu, if you enable the Universe, Multiverse, and Backports option (don't know which is necessary, and you can Google for what this means if you don't know) in your /etc/apt/sources.list, you can then install it painlessly with:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install grisbi

and then don't click the update warning you see. Next, revert back to normal sources.list and follow with:

$ sudo apt-get update