Hi, I don't know if this is the right place to post this but please forgive me if not. Im a biology PhD student here in Germany. I come from a third world country and for several years have adopted and have been a participant of the open source philosophy. I use as much as possible linux (mainly debian and its derivatives) and have tried other unix open os's. Everytime I heard about governments in third world countries applying and favouring open source alternatives I feel a great satisfaction and feel that this is the way to go. Even though Im not an IT professional, Im not computer illiterate and have achieved some skills, mainly in linux, both in desktop and server use. All this story is to say that right now Im seeing the possibility to do something practical, useful and important with open source technology and Im asking for help and possible colaboration! In Colombia some family of mine own a small enterprise which is a medical microbiology laboratory. Patients are sent from hospitals and their blood, urine , hmm and other stuff.., are tested for things that range from iron in their blood to parasites and bacteria. The results are then sent back to their doctors. Some years ago, they tried to organize patients data using some sort of database -I dont know exaclty which because I was quite little at the time- but recently I found the old ibm computer (386 or so) and it looked like some sort of dbase or smthing like that. The interface looked very similar to modern ncurses. This thing ran in old DOS though. This approach was abandoned because there was nobody with computer knowledge around and one good day the program did not work well anymore. they continue with good old pen and paper until later they got a "new" computer running windows 95. Somebody helped by doing some forms in excel and they have used that until very recently. I dont want to blame windows but they have had many problems with this setting (instability, problems with the printer, etc) and are about to abandon it again to come back to the known old pen and paper system. I think linux could come to the rescue here and I have been investigating how. I thought on something simple, like access for linux or so but haven't found that many options. Because this is a very special project for me I want to give them something that they can trust, that it is easy to use and solid as a rock. I promised a new computer which I already have. I thought of something small, slim and recent. I didnt have the money to buy a brand new computer but I enjoyed building up a relatively new one from a very cheap dell mainboard (laptop) that found in ebay. I had to put a memory (512 mb), the harddrive (20 gb) I had from a broken laptop and a cdrom. The mainboard as it is at the moment has no tft screen and no keyboard but it works wonderfully with an external screen and keyboard and mouse (they can be found easily in Colombia). I thought of using it as a "mini tower" but still have to find something to cover the exposed parts and to make it stand. I thought on something "artistic" like a an acrilic cover or smthing like that, Im still working on it. In any case the hardware is not as crucial as the software to do the job. As said before I thought of an access-like program that could in a simple way organize patient data and generate reports to be printed, nothing fancy plain simple but very importantly stable and solid. In this way they would really see the impact of the software and the difference with what they were using previously. I have found names such as kexi or knoda and many others which are front ends of mySQL or postgreSQL etc. the feeling I have got from this first investigations is that either the tools are too inmature (for example kexi cannot generate decent reports yet) or too complex (client-server stuff with sql and so forth). If possible, I want to do everything in Debian. I installed etch on this dell mainboard and everything went well (I only have to test how stable is the hardware and if it is well aerated with the pseudo-case im constructing and if it will withstant up to 10 daily hours of constant operation at +- 30°C, etc). Very recently installed mySQL server and knoda and start to play a bit with it but I need guidance. Basically Im looking for advice from people with experience with this kind of projects and are interested on helping convince some people in a developing country about the practical applications of linux in an environment still dominated by $$$windows. I hope I have been able to introduce this mini-project more or less clearly and am looking forward for comments, opinions, questions of interested open source advocates.
Best regards, Felipe Leon. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
