and buried at sea.  Does anyone else smell the conspiracy theories in the air?

Alright, here’s the plan:  make Quicken 2009 run on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.  To do this we need to take a a couple steps:

1. Download and install Wine, which will allow us to run a windows program on Ubuntu.
2. Install Quicken itself, through Wine.

I will try to stay in the GUI as much as possible, but there will be some instances where we have to type entries in the command line.  This is heavily based on JDPFu.com’s tutorial (which leaves out an important thing.)

Also note, this is how I did it, and it doesn’t mean it will work for you.  No warranty, guarantee, or yada yada.  Back up your hard drive so you can recover your system if you screw up or the process screws up, etc.  Use at your own risk.

Also, this took me a really long time, since I have a slower connection.  Be prepared, be patient.

Install Wine

First, we install wine.  Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal. Type in:

sudo apt-get wine

Wait forever while Wine installs.  Do not close terminal.

Install Winetricks

Once Wine is installed, we install Winetricks.  More typing in Terminal is required.

cd ~/bin

This will move your terminal session to your /home/bin/ directory.  If you don’t have a /home/bin/ directory, go ahead and make one in your GUI, then move to the directory.

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks/

This command gets Winetricks for you.  If it doesn’t work, Winetricks may have moved.  Dust off your Google and go find another source.

chmod +x Winetricks

This is on JDPFu.com’s tutorial, but I got an error when it ran.  So, I skipped it.

Fiddle With Winetricks

So, now that we’ve got Winetricks, we need to fiddle with it.  Here is where I had problems with JDPFu.com’s tutorial.  He says something about shells, which led me to the solution, but here’s what I had to type, one at a time, in to the Terminal to get things going:

sh winetricks fontfix

sh winetricks corefonts vcrun6

sh winetricks gdiplus

sh winetricks dotnet20

sh winetricks dotnet30

sh winetricks ie6

sh winetricks ie8

When I ran winetricks ie8, I got an error.  I ran it again, and got no errors.  Cool.  Them I typed:

winecfg

I then OK’d out of the window that opened up.

Here’s another spot where I had a patch of trouble/confustion with JDPFu.com’s directions.  Here’s what I did in the GUI.

1. Put Quicken CD in CDROM, and when it was read, I navigated to the directory.
2. I copied the “install.exe” in the root directory of the CD to the desktop.
3. I right-clicked the install.exe on the desktop and selected properties.  I then went to the Permissions tab and changed the Execute checkbox to checked.
4. I then right clicked the install.exe and chose to install with Wine.
5. I went through the installation process and chose to register the product later.  I installed from a previous file, and everything went smoothly.

Everything was a little sluggish, but my computer is also very old and has minimal RAM.  All the numbers seemed correct.  There were some cosmetic problems, though.  First, the quicken pages built themselves very slowly.  The charts take a few seconds to come up and clicking a button or tab makes the button or tab appear to swim.  Also, when I shut the program down, it looks like the program has to cycle through everything I looked at, which takes a while.  If you know how to solve these problems, please email me at myname@myname.com (insert my full name, of course.)

Wow, apparently Michigan State Sen. Bruce Casswell thinks that being a foster kid isn’t bad enough, so he’s proposed that they not be allowed to purchase clothes that aren’t second-hand.  So, no nice new clothes for you, child who’s had their life upended.  Apparently this also includes things like undergarments and shoes.  How vile.

As soon as I have some time.

I have had a very unlucky few days, and I don’t want to talk about it.

As Much As This Week

There are no pictures since I was eating out with my supervisor and my colleagues.  Again, it would’ve been a little weird.

Breakfast: Skipped.

Lunch:  Mexican.  I had beef nachos without the beans and I ate around the chips.  I ended up having shredded beef, sour cream, guacamole, and cheese.

Dinner:  I went to the Taste of New Orleans, and had the shrimp and sausage from a shrimp boil, a different sausage from a separate serving tray, a few potato slices from the shrimp boiled, two crab “thingies”, and some bread pudding.  I was doing fine until the bread pudding, then I felt a little queasy and my knees hurt like the dickens afterward.  I don’t think bread pudding and I are going to be friends.

Breakfast: Skipped.

Lunch:   I ate out again for lunch, a small started salad with roasted vegetables with a pork tenderloin entree with mustard sauce and a side of carrots and a side of cabbage.  I also had about three bites of a rustic dinner roll with amle butter. and the innards or two very small herb roasted potatoes.  Lunch was a “Brave New Restaurant”, which is probably the the most flavorful place I’ve eaten at since I came to Little Rock.  It would’ve looked goofy to take a picture, so I didn’t.

Dinner:  Three snow crab clusters with about 4 T butter and a small lettuce salad, witha  lump of cheese.

 I’m still really tired from the time change.  It was extremely hard to keep my eyes open all day.

Breakfast:  Two eggs, fried in butter, two strips of bacon, microwaved, and some california vegetables with a multivitamin.

Lunch:  Taco salad!  Yum! and a gala apple.

Dinner:   Went out to eat at  a Czech restaurant.  Had a potato pancake and pork in mushroom brown sauce.  I didn’t take a picture because it would’ve been extra weird under the situation.

Breakfast:  Broccoli quiche and a hard-boiled egg.

Lunch:  I went to Rotary meeting today and had two fillets from some sort of white fish, with mixed vegetables.  Rotray usually doesn’t have much of a low carb selection, but there is enough to make a reasonable meal.  When I got back from the meeting, my boss invited me to have some homemade pound cake with homemade whipped cream.  So, diet failure.  It wasn’t  very filling (after all, it was a dessert), so I then had a couple pieces of jerky.

Dinner:  Stupendous taco salad!

Since the time change on Sunday, I’ve been dragging.  So, chalk me up to low energy today.  Also, the pound cake really upset my stomach.  I don’t think I’ll eat that again.

Feeling pretty good!  I’ve got a lot of energy, so I got a lot done.

Breakfast:  1/4 broccoli quiche with a side of about 5 strawberries and about 3 T cream with a topping of chopped walnuts.  I didn’t eat the egg, since I felt full.

Lunch:  Not everything would fit on one picture, but over lunch I had another bunch of broccoli with cheddar cheese and bacon, along with three snow crab clusters and butter.  Then I topped it all off with a gala apple.

Dinner:  A chicken breast, five medium black olives and a lump of cheese.

I had tons of energy today, but felt a little worn out from all the walking I did yesterday.