Moving the parents to Linux 6625
Jericho Swarm
I I was pooking around with GnuCash last night a bit. As a long time Quicken user one thing that I *really* like about Quicken is how it's easy to reconcile my bank statements. For example... Each time I or my wife goes to the ATM I never bother entering the transaction in to Quicken. The only transactions that I enter are the bills that I pay each month.
They are probably a bit more technology savvy that most people in their 70's. They have a grandchild with an iBook and they have heard me talk about Linux enough...
Reconciling transactions with my bank (Bank of America) is easy. I go to the web-site and download all the activity for the last month. It generates a *.QIF file for me that I then open with Quicken. Done! It updates all my records, enters all the ATM transactions and reconciles the checks that were cleared.
Looking at GNU cash it appears that the way to do this is to manually reconcile each transaction... yuck. There is some option to have it integrate with banking systems but I first need to setup some ECDB(????) thing with my bank, have them issue me a letter with a crypto-key and all sorts of other complications. This seems very complicated compared to simply downloading a QIF file and reconciling that way.
(Disclaimer) - I just started looking at GnuCash yesterday so maybe there is a way of doing this... it's just not obvious how and the 'Help' for reconciling statements doesn't mention this.
Since they are willing to dump AOL, Linux is a viable alternative, although the Mac would...
I'm not familiar with Inkscape but Scribus is more than enough for greeting cards.
No loss there. I never understood why anyone uses AOL since the mostly use it as a generic ISP to access the web anyway.
Moving the parents to Linux 6626
Linux Advocacy from Newsgroups