Tuesday, August 28, 2007

GNUmed - user first reports bugs then success

en_US
GNUmed is free as in freedom but many users think it comes at a price. The price tag shows the resources you put in to make it run on your systems.

A long time ago I decided to make the installation process easier. This involved producing an installer for MS Windows. Few users have reported on their experience but it seems GNUmed benefits from its packaged versions. This holds true for Debian , Ubuntu and MS Windows.

Just a few days ago a German doctor reported a problem with GNUmed 0.2.6.3. One E-Mail and a fix later he has been successful in bootstrapping a GNUmed database and running the client against it. Congrats. Way to go. While we don't know about his computer skills he is a doctor by profession and not a fulltime IT-guy.

He asked about the scanner connectivity and framegrabber options and has since reported success.

But what's worth even more is the bug he triggered and reported which makes us release version 0.2.6.4 in a few days which holds a number of fixes.

He even supplied us with valuable information on how to connect the German legacy app 'DocConcept' to GNUmed through our great XML-RPC interface. As of now we have four (4) legacy apps in our Wiki which can interact with GNUmed without a single code change.

Well thanks to our testers. For him updating to future versions will be a piece of cake.

de_DE
Dank eines Kollegen wissen wir nun von einer weiteren erfolgreichen GNUmed Installation. Nach zwei E-Mails und einem Fehlerreport durch den Kollegen konnte auf seinem Windowssystem eine GNUmed-Datenbank erzeugt werden und auch ein Client damit verbinden.

Ich nenne das Erfolg. So schwer kann die Installation nicht sein. Obwohl ich vermute, dass der Kollegen überdurchschnittliche PC-Kenntnisse hat.

Nun nachdem durch ihn ein Fehler entdeckt und gemeldet wurde wird demnächst die Version 0.2.6.4 als Zwischversion vor der 0.2.7 veröffentlicht.

Beigesteuert hat er auch seine Erfahrungen bei der Anbindung von 'DocConcept' an GNUmed. Wir haben jetzt also 4 Praxisprogramme , die über die Schnittstelle mit GNUmed interagieren können.

Und jetzt sind für den Kollegen Updates nur einen Mausklick entfernt denn den vermeintlich schwierigen Teil der Installation hat er ja bereits gemeistert.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

hm.. Looks like I'll have to test gnumed as well :) I'm a medical student and I must admit I adore the linux and open source craze. In fact, I'm thinking of starting to learn serious programming myself (as soon as I get some free time).

If only you had a Live CD with which I could play... but you're probably worried about the bandwidth, no servers to support you eh?

Sebastian Hilbert said...

Hi medigeek,

We would love to have a live cd but we have had no time to keep it current. Building one takes roughly 10 to 12 hours for KNOPPIX but updating it is a pain.

But since you use Ubuntu why don't you just install it ?
The gutsy package is here
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/misc/gnumed-client

You don't need to install the server part since we have a public server which you can use to connect to.

If you wanna help just research how to build and update Live-CDs. I thin Debian Live would be the most appropriate and easiest to maintain.

We have bandwidth as long as the downloads are not by the thousands.

Unknown said...

I just did this:

"But since you use Ubuntu why don't you just install it ?
The gutsy package is here
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/misc/gnumed-client"

when trying to start nothing happens!

Sebastian Hilbert said...

There are issues with Gutsy that cannot be overcome easily as Ubuntu won't update the version of GNUmed.

The proposed fix is here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/+source/gnumed-client/+bug/154136

One can however install the Debian package with some effort. We would like someone to host a seperate repository and will continue to work on getting Ubuntu supported.

Ubuntu Hardy will have a version that is quite usable.

Follow the launchpad entry to get the news.

Sebastian Hilbert said...

The situation on Ubuntu has improved greatly.

Check out https://launchpad.net/~gnumed/+archive/ppa

We keep up to date packages there.

Sebastian