Re: Anyone using LedgerSMB in Australia?

[wr2006 <..hidden..>]

The best way to sum up my technical ability would be to say that I am a 
perpetual Linux noob.  Therefore, the idea upgrading with "yum upgrade 
ledger-smb" is very appealing. 

One of the things that concerns me about this project is the lack of local 
support.  From the website, there are only two companies offering commercial 
support, both based in Nth America.  The problem with this is timezone 
difference - if you have a problem on Monday morning, you may need to wait 
until Tuesday morning for support.

I did a search for "ledger-smb support" this morning and could only find one 
company offering support in Australia.  The problem is that as there appears 
to be no Ledger-SMB certification, I have no way of telling how qualified 
they are to offer support.

This to me is a weakness with L-SMB and needs to be addressed sooner rather 
than later.  Interested to here if users from other parts of the world have 
similar concerns.

-- 
Wayne Ritchie

On Thursday 03 April 2008 09:47:10 am Marco Hess wrote:
> 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.