[lug] Wine, Quicken, etc. on Linux (partly OT)

[Elyse Grasso]

My laptop is a Linux-only box, with no Windows installation or partitions. 
I use Quicken (1998, I think), on a Windows machine at home, for financial 
stuff. (The laptop and Win2k box can communicate using samba and vnc).

I may be contracting in Minneapolis for 3  months or more, beginning at 
fairly short notice, and I would like to be able to keep my financial records 
updated and have them available. I don't think I have the time or energy to 
learn a new financial tool right now.

Can someone provide or point me to fairly detailed instructions on how to get 
Quicken installed and running on my laptop using WINE (assuming that is 
possible)?

Now the OT part: when I first used Quicken, years ago, I used their year-end 
mechanism to split the data, so that files would not be too big to back up 
easily on 5-inch floppies. Now that I use ZIP disks for backups instead of 
floppies I would like to pull the data back together. Has anyone done this? 

I realize that whatever mechanism I use will require a fair amount of manual 
tweaking, and I will probably learn far more than I ever wanted to know about 
exporting and importing data in Quicken. I think that to avoid problems with 
transfers and duplicated records the safest way to deal with things will be 
to do date-limited exports from all of the databases (including my current 
one) and import them into a fresh database in sequence. Then compare with the 
old databases to make sure the ending balances look right for each account, 
and adjust as needed.

Since I will have the export files available in any case, I may do a parallel 
import of the pre-95 (or whenever) data into GNUcash to see what it looks 
like. (Pulling things back nearly on topic with a mighty heave.) 

Are there any other Linux finance packages that I should investigate while 
I'm at it?  Anything that can match Quicken's functionality of 6 or 8 years 
ago would be sufficient: I use TurboTax, but I don't do automated imports of 
info from Quicken because my categories don't map well, and I don't use it 
for detailed tracking of investments.

Thanks

Elyse