…Two OSes diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

This entry continues my quest for Linux software. Specifically, software that does under Linux what my necessary Windows software does, so I can hopefully spend more of my time in Linux instead of Windows.

The first item on my list needs a little explanation. One of the business correspondents I mentioned in an earlier post has to use Outlook for his e-mail. Since Outlook doesn’t support GnuPG directly, I introduced him to GPGShell, a nice little Windows front-end program for GPG. Unfortunately, some change that his company’s notoriously-unfriendly IT department made recently caused all encrypted messages from him to have a blank line between each of the original message’s lines. This caused GPG (and Thunderbird’s Enigmail extension) to fail to decrypt them automatically. It only took a little experimentation to figure out that if I simply deleted the first of those extra blank lines, GPG would happily deal with the rest. I would copy the entire encrypted message to the Windows clipboard, use GPGShell’s “view/edit clipboard” option, delete the offending line, and then (with a single key-press) decrypt the message text. Another on-screen button copied the decrypted text back to the clipboard, ready for pasting into Thunderbird as a quotation.

I could do this via the GPG program itself (once I figured out that Linux uses control-D to enter an end-of-file symbol, instead of the control-Z or F6 keys that DOS and Windows always have), but it wasn’t as pleasant as I prefer, so I went hunting.

The answer turned out to be a package called Seahorse. After installing it, and figuring out how to enable it’s gedit text-editor plug-in, I could copy the encrypted text into the text editor, delete the extra blank line, use a menu command to decrypt the message, then copy it back as a quotation. It’s not perfect… for some of his messages, it just claims that it can’t decrypt them (due to “timeout by message bus”), but it works for most of them, and I could decrypt the others using the GPG command-line program, so I was satisfied for the moment.

Next up: instant-messaging software. I use Trillian under Windows, because I’m part of four different IM networks (besides Skype) and don’t want to run four different IM programs all the time. It took only seconds to discover that the recommended equivalent for Trillian was a program called GAIM (recently renamed to Pidgin). And even better, it was already installed in Ubuntu, so I fired it up and entered my IM accounts. It went very smoothly; all of my contacts were imported with no problems (though I had to re-sort many of them into the groups that I’d had them in before). Nice!

Now came the part that I’d been dreading: financial software.

I started keeping financial records on the computer nine or ten years ago, in Microsoft Money (and never upgraded from my original version). I switched to Quicken, for various reasons, three years ago. My files are a mess, and I was tempted to start from scratch, but I decided to try importing them first.

It worked properly on the third try — the errors on the first two were because I hadn’t imported all the accounts at the same time. It took me hours to get everything sorted out, correcting the accumulated cruft of nearly a decade, but the program’s double-entry bookkeeping system helped quite a bit. The only problem I had with it was when it seemed to run out of memory or something, then it acted strangely until I’d shut down it and some other programs and restarted it.

But the fun wasn’t over yet! I wanted to use the OFX Direct Connect feature that my bank is supposed to support. GnuCash supports it too, but due to “license incompatibilities,” the distribution package doesn’t have it enabled by default. (I understand the reasons behind this, and they make perfect sense, but it means a lot of extra confusion for the end user — especially when the end user is new to Linux.) Getting support for this feature required a bunch of downloading and recompiling, but only a few things that I needed to type in, carefully listed on the GnuCash wiki. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s not difficult if you’re careful to follow the directions.

At this point, confident, eager, and flush with success, I hit a brick wall: although my bank is supposed to have OFX support, the information to access it isn’t available, anywhere. After a couple hours of fruitless searching, I gave up and tried the old-fashioned method: downloading the QFX data files from the bank’s website and importing them manually. That worked, and it’s what I had to do in Quicken too, so while it would have been nice not to go to their website all the time, I’m not going to complain too much.

The only other Windows program that I use regularly (other than Microsoft Visual Studio, which I don’t plan to even try to run on Linux) is DogMelon’s Note Studio. It’s a very useful little program, primarily for three major features: it’s wiki-like ability to link pages together, it’s ability to encrypt certain books or pages, and the (to me) most critical feature, the PalmOS version. I’ve used it very extensively for the past couple years to store all kinds of information, and can access any of it with just a few taps or clicks, on my Palm TX or on my Windows system. I usually have two or three Note Studio windows open on the notebook computer at any one time, viewing or editing different pages.

Unfortunately, there no Linux version of it, and no way to get the Windows version to work (or even install) under Linux, with or without WINE. And I haven’t been able to find any other program with those three critical features. (There are a few places I haven’t yet looked though.) I might write one eventually; until I do I’ll just have to keep that on a Windows machine.

So the Linux experiment is winding to a successful close now, with all but one of the major programs that I use moved over. In the next installment, I plan to get an automatic backup system running and discuss some other neat features I discovered about Ubuntu Linux.