Announcement 2.5.0

Gnucash 2.5.0 Unstable

The GnuCash development team is pleased to announces the release of GnuCash 2.5.0, the first of several unstable 2.5.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. With this new release series, GnuCash comes with a collection of new features for everyone, and especially upgraded online banking capabilities for German users. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX. This release is intended for developers and testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

Download:

• http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/unstable/2.5.x/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files/gnucash%20%28unstable%29/2.5.0/

What's New in GnuCash 2.5.0?

• Robert Fewell has contributed a rewrite of the ledger (Gnucash's primary interface window) to use the GtkTreeModel (select "register 2" from the menu) as well as a new CSV import/export facility for account trees.Take care not to try to open a single account in both the old and new registers at the same time. Doing so will crash Gncuash

• Gnucash now requires Gtk+-2.24 and GLib-2.26. We've removed most of the dependencies on libraries obsoleted by project Ridley and will be in position to move to Gtk+-3.x once the GtkTreeModel register window work is complete. This means that Gnucash 2.5 requires Debian 6, RHEL 6, or one of the more aggressive distributions like Ubuntu.

• Gnucash now works with Guile-2.0.

• The business module has been revamped and we introduce some new features:
  • Credit Notes
  • Customer and Vendor Overview Pages
  • Customer Overview Reports
  • Existing Transactions may be reassigned as invoice payments
  • Support for duplicate invoices
  • Improved invoice and bill handling: Post, print, or duplicate multiple items directly from a search results list
  • Better invoice printing setup: Choose a default invoice report as a preference
  • Reorder invoice entries in the invoice window

• The "Num" field is now optionally per-split rather than per-transaction.

• Gnucash can print to a PDF for reports and invoices
• Account "Filter By" settings can be saved and recalled
• Account entries in the Chart of Account can be colored

• When opening a locked "book" one now has the option of opening it read-only. Note that Gnucash is still a single-user program and that the database backends are still used only as a data store.

• Gnucash is no longer subject to the "2038" bug, so that 30-year mortgages can now be entered correctly.

• By agreement of all authors we have relicensed Gnucash to the Gnu Public License Version 2 or later from just Version 2.

Caveats for testers:

Any unstable version might crash and cause data-loss. If at all possible don't work on your real accounting files with an unstable release. If you just can't help yourself, save often! Better yet, use the SQL backend so that Gnucash saves everything as it goes... but remember that the SQL backend doesn't make separate backups, so make your own to protect against Gnucash writing bad data into the database.

How can you help?

• Documentation: The documentation largely reflects the 2.4 release. Since most developers are better at writing for computers than for humans, this is an area where experienced users can be of great help. See Contributing to GnuCash on how to get involved.
• Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there. Please file bug reports in Bugzilla.
• Translating: A new version means new strings to translate. If you're able to write well in some language other than English and can read English well enough to understand the documentation, consider helping with translating Gnucash and its documentation. Translation has the details of how to participate.