Paul, Those are the three options availablefor installing GnuCash on Linux. Building from the tarball (or a cone from the Github repository is fairly simple once you have the dependencies setup. The first step is to run cmake to setup the build files. That process halts when a missing dependency (most commonly the development header for a library) is not found on the system. Sometimes the library files have a slightly different name from what cmake reports as the library name. Using "apt- cache search <package name>" at a terminal you can usually identify the appropriate name to use and load with apt ( maybe apt-get on Ubuntu). At various times there have been shell scripts for loading the dependencies if you search the mailing list archives. They may need a bit of updating. I run Linux Mint and when I do a new install of the OS from scratch I usually use the above strategy with cmake and apt-search and update the shell script first time I build on a new OS install. I think there is a copyof the shell script on the Wiki in the Linux install section as well.
You can install all three versions but you may get some collisions between the install from a repository and a self built version, less so with the flatpak because it is sandboxed. Where the flatpak places the user preference files may be different although I don't know that is necessarily the case. I usually build and install on Linux MInt in /usr/local and AFAIK the repository version gets installed under /usr but there may be conflicts with the shared library files if they are different versions of GC although AFAIK they are still separate. It's been so long since I installed the repository version (2.something) that I am no longer sure. The Ubuntu and Linux Mint repositories usually only catch up to a fairly recent version at a major OS release point. On Sun, 2026-10-04 at 19:32 -0400, [email protected] wrote: > Playing around with a VM that I had earlier installed 5.14 on, I > found > GC failed to start after Ubuntu upgraded itself to 26.04. It's an > unimportant historical install, so I just started hacking at things. > I > updated the dependencies and tried a new build, but that also failed, > so > I just deleted the whole gnucash folder in /opt and am about to > restart > from scratch. > > This whole thing is an exercise in better understand how the various > elements interact or conflict, so I'm just playing. It seems I have 3 > basic alternatives: > 1. build from source (presumably download the sources tarball, expand > and run the build) > 2. use Software to install the default gnucash from the Ubuntu > repositories > 3. use Software to install the flatpak version > > Is that correct, and are all three of these fundamentally equivalent > (vis-a-vis execution, not development) if successfully installed? > > Also, can I do all three on the same Ubuntu system without creating > conflicts? > > Thanks for all help, Paul > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > [email protected] > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. -- David Cousens _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
