Re: Anyone using LedgerSMB in Australia?

[Marco Hess <..hidden..>]

I am in Australia and have been using LedgerSMB for over a year now. It works quite well for what I using it for which is a small company with small scale product assembly and sales and some engineering consultancy. I spend quite a bit to get all the invoices and documents look right.

I am on version 1.12. I have installed it on SME Server (see contribs.org) which is CentOS 4.5 based and also runs all the other services in my office like file server, email, website, subversion,  Trac for my software development projects. At the time I was able to install LSMB with just a few extra rpm based perl packages.

Since 1.12 however, the devs have pulled in a number of perl libraries that apparently are not that common and I have been unable to find the corresponding updated rpms for these libraries for CentOS4 or Redhat Enterprise Linux 4. I got a fair way but in the end was unable to resolve some final dependencies and I gave up.

I am not a full blown Linux guru, but I know my way around a fair bit and have installed numerous packages successfully, but LSMB as far as I am concerned it is going backwards in installability. I had several attempts at installing LSMB on my SME Server machine (and clean VMware based installs) without success and it annoys me that it requires packages that are only available for the bleeding edge of distributions but leave stable installations like CentOS 4 out in the cold. 

In comparison, I installed various other accounting packages with much more success. One such package was PostBooks that really impressed me when I had it up and running with a configured database within 5 minutes from the download. It's a pitty that it is mainly manufacturing oriented and has little support for keeping track of service type sales (which don't have inventory :-) )

LedgerSMB would be far more popular package if its installation was more easy with minimal dependencies on the installer having to find the right packages. It should really be as easy as 'yum install ledgersmb' and have yum resolve the dependencies from a single repository like dag to be off and running.

Or even if an instant VMware image would be wonderful.

Marco


Phil Rhoades wrote:

People,


On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 22:43 +1100, James McDonald wrote:
  

wr2006 wrote:
    

Does not look like there are to many AU users.  I have been using it for the 
past 9 months and it works fine.  If your worried about GST, that works fine 
too - there is an AU chart of accounts.

As far as the project goes, support is generally good through the mailing 
list.  Not sure were the project is heading - there does not appear to much 
of a road map.  But maybe I have not been looking in the right place!

There are some very annoying things that it does or does not do but hopefully 
they will get sorted out in the near future.

If you have any AU specific questions,  I will do my best to answer them.  But 
be aware that I am far from being an expert.

WR

  
      

Thanks very much for the reply WR. I am slowly putting together the 
structure of a business to support myself just in case the co I work for 
closes down (optimism isn't my forte).

Ledger is part of my strategy I will be using it to produce nice invoices.

It will be good to be able to bounce ideas off you.
    

I changed from sqll to lsmb a while ago - I'm no guru though . .

Regards,

Phil.