I just got GnuCash 2.3.8 installed on my Ubuntu 8.10 box (Intrepid). I switched the display engine over to webkit just for kicks. The official GnuCash documentation seems to indicate that you should pass the –enable-webkit switch to ./configure in order to build GnuCash using webkit, but configure did not recognize that switch. Instead, I had to use –with-html-engine=webkit to make ./configure use webkit instead of GtkHTML.

Once I got ./configure to run correctly, make returned a few errors that I thought would be helpful to document in case others see the same issue. The three most outstanding errors returned by make were:

/usr/local/lib/gnucash/libgncmod-report-gnome.so: undefined reference to `gnc_html_export'
/usr/local/lib/gnucash/libgncmod-report-gnome.so: undefined reference to `gnc_html_copy'
/usr/local/lib/gnucash/libgncmod-report-gnome.so: undefined reference to `gnc_html_new'

After poking around on the internet for a bit, I stumbled on a solution. Seems some symbols have been moved from one library to another since my old 2.2.9 build. Removing everything in /usr/local/lib/gnucash and then doing a make clean (just to be thorough) fixed the build error and allowed make to finish correctly.

Not sure I can tell a difference between GtkHTML and webkit yet. Reports seem to work a bit faster, but that may be more a product of the 2.2.9 to 2.3.8 upgrade and not the display engine. Regardless, it’s working.

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