Thursday, January 29, 2009

GNUmed Windows installation improved

They say there is always room for improvement. And then they say if you want to get it done just do it. Despite my impression that the Windows installation is straightforward a number of potential users have complained about the GNUmed prerequisites.

GNUmed stands on the shoulders of giants. It uses python, wxpython, psycopg2, PIL, twainmodule and mxTools.

While the installation of those prerequisites is well laid out in our Wiki it still seems to be a consuming process which has led to failure in the past. There is no such thing as dependency handling as we know from Linux on MS Windows. Nevertheless we have come up with a solution that may please potential users.

There is two ways to overcome this.

1.) Use the "brand new installation routine" which handles prerequisites for you. There is now a new version available for download which has the term "full" appended to its name and version. The new installation routine will check your system for all prerequisite software mentioned before and will give you the option to install python, wxpython, PIL, mxTools, psycopg2 and twainmodule if those are not detected on your system.


2.) One can always use the Portable version of GNUmed which is a
'download and run version' all self contained. While this is
recommended for portable storage media such as USB pendrives little is
known about using this on a daily basis.


Hopefully this will make the installation of the GNUmed client on MS Windows even easier.

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