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Cubit Accounting software package is developed and updated by a South African company for local businesses. As stated on its website, cubit is a secure network accouning package that works on linux & windows and with no-per user licensing. Initially I did have problems when installing the software onto my server. This reference guide is to install cubit accounting onto a server using Ubuntu 6.10 operating system.

Perform a clean installation of Ubuntu 6.10 server onto your computer without including the LAMP server and log in using your username and password.

Uncomment the universe repository under the /etc/apt/sources.list file as seen:

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the ‘universe’
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe main restricted
# deb-src http://za.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe

Update the repositories using apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get update

Install gcc, a GNU C compiler. This should be found on the Ubuntu 6.10 server CD:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc

Install dialog, which allows dialog boxes in scripts and on commandlines:

$ sudo apt-get install dialog

Install libreadline5-dev, allows consistency in the user interface of command lines.

$ sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev

Install zlib1g-dev, helps deflate compression:

$ sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

Install flex, generates scanners that recognise lexical(words of language) patterns in text:

$ sudo apt-get install flex

Install bison, is a language parser:

$ sudo apt-get install bison

Install checkinstall, which keeps track of all the files created or modified by your installation script:

$ sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Download the cubit accounting software:

Untar the bz2 file after the download has completed:

$ tar xvf cubitl286.tar.bz2

Change into the directory and run the install script as root:

$ cd cubit-2.86/

/cubit-2.86$ sudo ./install.sh

Press ok to the first warning screen

Install the with the SSL installation(default) and press OK

The installation should continue, installing apache, compiling and installing postgres and finally installing cubit accounting. This will take some time.

Once the installation is complete, change to the cubit directory /usr/local/cubit:

$ cd /usr/local/cubit

To avoid the error that “httpd: bad group name nobody” which would stop apache from starting. In the Cubit directory under conf, edit the httpd.conf file. Replace Group nobody with Group www-data :

$ sudo nano conf/httpd.conf

User nobody

Group www-data

Start Cubit accounting server with the script under Cubit directory. Apache and Postmaster should confirm that they have started:

$ sudo ./start_cubit.sh

Using firefox webrowser on a networked computer, type in the IP address of the server and Cubit Accounting should be present.

http://192.168.0.3

I am a finance student, and require a professional suite of programs to write essays and to calculate financial data. My needs are a basic word processor and a spreadsheet program. Initially I looked at Microsoft Office, the most popular office suite that also had a student licence. However the licence prohibited me from using the software in commerce. As a student, I will be finishing my studies shortly, therefore this student licence did not meet my needs and the next best licence was too expensive. With my growing interest of open source software, I considered OpenOffice.

I held a perspective like many others, that OpenOffice can not perform on the same level as MS Office. Therefore I chose for myself to start using Openoffice for my daily work. The work included deadlines and also needed complex financial formulaes to be built into the spreadsheet.

I learnt to use Openoffice quickly and found it had pleasing farmilarity in layout and style with MS Office. The important features that I was accustomed to in MS Office were avaliable in Openoffice. One feature built into Openoffice is a formula feature that allows the user to represent mathematical symbols and sums in a professional manner. It uses a simple editor to manipulate the sums. However I found the Openoffice documentation to be inadequate in explaining this useful feature.

There are examples attached at the bottom of the page of work that have been achieved under Openoffice. This may help in disproving the perspectives that we have on this fine suite of office programs. Finance Cashflow Examples