 So welcome to the evening of it, I just announced it yesterday that it might be a little bit late, but perhaps some people were interested to come and meet me also in the morning. I've heard the wireless started working at two o'clock yesterday in the night, so perhaps people are not sleeping well. I have prepared three little slides with nearly no contents. I want to say where we come from, where we go, and where we are, where we want to go. We come from, but here's a little funny image from the LSM in Bordeaux from 2001. In this stage, we had about four packages about microbiology, which are partly orphans or have no maintainer. And we had this strange idea that we should do something about medicine. The idea was a little bit born because there were some people there in the medical track at LSM. This is called Libre Software Meeting, also, and it's one of those events, who tried to translate an installation of a medical program into several languages, French and Italian and so on. I saw what's the sense of translating installation instructions instead of making some packages and just install the program. So, I gave a talk on the next day, and so the idea of the Labian Medicine Project started. And currently we have about 40 packages that are concerning about topics like microbiology and genetics and so on. We have nine packages which deal with medical imaging, and we have even one practice management program, but the problem is the available free upstream software for practice management is nearly nothing, so it's just in the very beginning and so it's very hard to pick up some software which is useful to manage a medical practice. So, as the expectations in DavionMate are very high, people here, oh, DavionMate, I take it and will run my medical practice with free software and I have to make some people a little bit careful, because it's not really possible. Then we have up to now a system of so-called meta packages that allow the interested user to just pour in the interesting packages. The problem is if I'm a new user, say a biologist who heard about DavionMate and said that DavionMate might be helpful, he might manage to install DavionMate and then he is lost because he will not find all the interesting stuff amongst this 15,000 or 18,000 or whatever packages and he will not have any fun to read through the descriptions and so it is quite easy to say him, well, install the same mid-biology package and you get everything you need and you already sense the sense of these meta packages and works for medical imaging. We have also meta packages for the development of medical applications and also biology applications. If you wonder why I have such a strong focus on biology, I'm working in an institute where it's done some pre-clinical research which DNA sequences and soft people just need this for medical research in spider sense. There might be some people who think, well, we should start a Davion biology project, this is fine, but up to now nobody really started to do some Davion biology project, so it's just included here. It works. Then we have a system of some user menus, so if you install these meta packages, you get as a user the menu where you see all the applications that are interesting for you, so it's some kind of visibility inside Davion, this project to make users aware that there is something which is interesting for you as a user that is specialized in medical care. We also have a website, a mailing list and, well, just a group of people who are reading this mailing list and I'm contributing to the medical stuff that is very helpful and this group has grown over these six years and I'm quite happy that I do not really have to care anymore for the biological stuff because there is a strong focus because of the simple fact that there is some free software which deals with the stuff. The clinical part is not so good, as I said before, but I hope this will change in the future. And about the future, we have something on our to-do list, like this Ampoise suite, perhaps you have heard about it, this is kind of a larger suite for microbiologists who are, which contains large data sets and so on. This package is in experimental currently and we are discussing currently on the Davion development list which, or how to include large data sets in Davion, using programs you cannot load the archive with gigabytes of data which is used by a handful of users so it makes no sense, but what makes sense. We have no real idea of what is in here. We want to include some clinical applications. I've told you that we have a gloomate client packaged, this is currently more or less my turn and the gloomate software is also a server component which is a little bit more difficult to package and I just have no time to do it. I will do it once I'm back from that conference and we will have more time. Then there are other practice management systems you can, maybe you see it like everywhere in the world are people who are thinking can I manage my medical practice system and assume they are not connected to the internet and just start programming without doing any research before and this is the reason why we have 20 programs which are all programmed in a different language in a different database system using web applications, some native client but there is nearly no communication in between these projects and this is really strange because it's such a splint of the forces you can observe there and my hope is to find a way with the Scythian main system to integrate some of the interesting projects and to make them feel that there is something else and they can start co-working together because it's more of a political intent to get these people together in the process you cannot compete with commercial producers of programs if you are split over the world and not together, this kind of community for me. Then we have also some medical billing systems which are kind of specialized to each country because every county has a medical billing system and so it's a little bit hard to decide which is reasonable for packaging because it's quite a special thing but we try what we can do. And then there is one really large application, it is called Vista it intends to manage a hospital and it is used in the United States it was funded by some better organization and it is a very advanced system and it is a really good system it's also free software but the problem is it is programmed with mumps Has anybody heard about mumps? I also know it is a very special system and it should be very clever to handle databases but it has a very steep learning curve and we had to first package mumps but nobody knows about it so I just can try it and look if it runs and then we have to package Vista and Vista is a program people who are programming this system told me well it is free software because we are really sure that people come to us and tell ourselves because it's so terribly difficult to install, you will not manage it anyway so I think really good news from a packaging point of view but this is something we need some more time over there but it is unheard of because it is the only system which is really worth mentioning as a productive system so then we have some medical research tools I am keen on packaging it is called NetAPE some people who are concerned with medicine might know this AP info system and this tries to implement this AP info system which is an old DOS program as a web application with a post DOS database and then there are some R tools for epidemiology research which I would like to package then on my to-do list are further common the current event distribution issues because I think we can implement more advanced techniques like automatic website generation from the package description so for instance we know what we have which packages we have the link to the packages of medical imaging are in this main imaging package so we use a dependency list and look at the description of these packages we could auto generate the stuff we have in every field and this is some interesting thing of course well Canon for the website is just a boring thing for everybody but he really likes it so it would be nice if he could do some automatic mechanism then I would like to implement some better desktop integration and as I said I try to do it this in the custom deviant distribution scope because I think every custom deviant distribution would have to deal with this issue and I would like to push this topic because we in the deviant med team are quite a weak force and we need some more people to program some code and to help here in this direction and so if we manage to convince other people like deviant edu and so which are much more to use common tools we can profit in the whole deviant from these techniques so I'm always talking about this deviant distribution from deviant conferences and whatever for the future I also think about implementing further communication channels like RLC I have to admit I'm quite an old man I'm 40 years old, RLC is a technique I stayed away for the last years and perhaps I have to change my mind about this because if it comes to the moment where we get more people to get a better system running I think this communication would be necessary and on the distribution side I think we should care about an installer that installs CDs and trust constraints, the medical stuff so if we are we think we have something really to show the people then we should be able to give them an install CD which installs all the medical stuff and is prepared for just running a system that is not so general deviant which makes just more work if you know what you're doing then perhaps an interesting topic would be a live CD just to show off some exhibitions and give people something I know that people are really keen on getting a live CD if they are on an exhibition booth and so perhaps we should try to do something this direction and another goal is for me to get deviant made effort a little bit more visible in the general deviant installation if you install deviant from the DVD you get faster and desktop and whatever printing software or whatever but things like deviant Evo and deviant UNO deviant made as a completely hidden people do not notice that there is something and so I would like to convince the installer people to give us a hook to attract people in this direction so this is what I think is interesting for the future and what I think we could do some perhaps everybody could introduce in himself to say what's his interest in deviant made and so we learn to know and can discuss a little bit about how we came up together stop here I work for a company that does a data entry application for drug trials and we're currently based on Ubuntu as I was saying at the time which is in deviant made producing some free software application and the software is proprietary ok there is no problem I have just seen no problem I have really no problem I always a bit more to interrupt your sentence after the both please fix the power that was ducted and closed sorry if I got it wrong if I have some talks about deviant made I think the idea is also to use the system for service providers for doctors also that they use deviant made to install a stable system and sell services for this and so it is perfectly ok to base proprietary software if you think you have some bushes on it so just tell us what we can do because also to figure out Supervisor Stefan Müller he is packaging some microgram if you don't work for him you will get that mark so you have to return it so it is quite easy my name is Andrei I am a PD tradition and I work a lot in intensive care you are hoping that you can provide some free software for your deviant to protect us all yeah I have got two interests I guess one is developing we will get involved in a project working on a software that would be useful in intensive care so that would either be neonates or paediatrics or adult intensive care and then the other thing is as part of doctors training particularly in this country but I think other countries as well there is a move to having log books and keeping track of like what procedures you do what types of cases you are seeing what your experience is so I would be interested in some kind of software that would work for that as well so you can keep track of the patients that you have seen maybe anonymise the data definitely anonymise the data but have a record of what procedures you did at a certain time and your training and so on that is a deviant user so are you comfortable with the deviant system? yeah I also do I do various since I have been serviced few deviant servers I have done quite a bit with the Linux v-server projects as well I am not a programmer I think I might be interested in them and I am comfortable with deviant so I think it is at least to my knowledge it is not so much there that books help you yeah it is just that we try to get some people to start programming on the common base also but now I am interested in getting involved yeah sure my name is Sean I am not involved in the medical community at all anyway but I have been tangentially involved with deviant meds via the db config common stuff I wanted to be here to be a fly on the wall and hear about sort of how the group is forming and how it relates to some of the custom deviant distributions I am a chemist actually I have been in the industry packages for deviant so that is also why I came here because it is tangentially to the biology part but I have also to say I am a physicist by profession and just dropped in by chances in the medical field so I am no expert at all also to get some general what we do for deviant we want to for chemistry we want to go for the sciences sometimes we cannot do some some ideas currently no such groups that care for this applicant in the other I have no response to that I guess another interest is just I have been a medical perspective in the project another thing I could contribute is just being a medical perspective in the project and just to take I am from Venezuela I am very involved in neither medical schools or chemistry or biology but I have been working with the government in Venezuela in order to promote free software and specifically deviant and until now most institutions in Venezuela and public health also does paper work for all other medical practices there is no paper in the system not even in proprietary software so I think deviant is a good option in order to promote it with an alternative for the paper work that is actually time consuming and money consuming having all the paper and it is actually in a Latin American country it is a way for corruption paper can be easily changed but free software provides a sense of security a lot of software that I cannot as well but the interesting thing is that this new made project started with the idea that if you have some paper you can provide copies to health insurance companies and this paper is an Md5 zoom of all your data send it to public server or not only one server to more than one server and if a doctor gets sued for misusing data also he has a chance to prove that his data is not changed because he can say there are Md5 zooms this is a secure system because the first idea for this new made system was to prove that the data are not changed perhaps this is something but I think the main problems that are missing this application perhaps you have some gift program or so they use Excel they have all their patients in Excel or Axis it's really fun why not open office normal office at least ok so I can't give you any more hints I'm Michael Moyer thank you my situation is similar to a one I have explained I work for InfoMet the national health network and we would like to make more videos so we can explore some ways to change knowledge to try some application we don't have more automated operation everything is paper and we would like to take the opportunity to try to know the most future application in order to to to get better better fixing we have been a lot in Debian since about one year or two years ago the network used to be spread out and then we had switched all nodes to Debian specifically I work for the telematic IT but I would like to give some knowledge or present to the staff to involve with medical operation I'm concerned I think it's interesting I can give to you both we have on the Debian website we have I call it to-do list about medical applications and there is some list of practice management system and clinical management systems and you could try to work down the list and try to evaluate these projects which are perhaps working in your area perhaps are applicable and that you try to package these systems and bring it in but my feeling was that they are not really complete and the main reason is in my opinion that some random doctors or IT staff thinks well I need a system and sits down and starts programming and this is not the way complex software can be designed and so this software has very often a weak design and needs real much work to make a good system but if you have nothing you can just take this and try how it works there are some projects also it's called care to it or whatever or you try to implement this but you have to be very brave to get it running and that can only work but if you have some empowerment you can do it and do everything to support this really strong system which is just hard to do let's give it a try MJ Van Debian Development and I've also for work proposed some hospitals to use free software applications and very much general things so far web applications like Plone and so on I know a few hospitals and other places that are starting to use them so I was really just here to find out a bit more about the specialist side of things it's also interesting to relearn to know which say special configurations so the medical people need to for a new clone some special things we could do in some preconfiguration also that we just compare the system to be easier to use for the medical stuff if you have some ideas I think it's a good idea to join the meeting just bring in your ideas so I'm Luca coming from Switzerland and I'm biologist from PhD in Geneva and so I follow the list three or four years now I called myself from a diploma some problems to interact with the ensemble database because at that time there was nothing more and I don't work now with the bioinformatics because I switch to the laboratory life but the main problem in life is that I'm the only one who who is in Geneva and the other problem is that the two most important problems in generalizing genetic sequence are commercial software and there are no user friendly ways to analyze them for the other people in the lab so that's the main problem this biologic software is often quite good in the function but the usage is different something always pipes your data in and gets your output out and it's not really what biologists like and want to use so any ideas how we can work together or how general suggestions to try to manage this or do you think that we if you know them you are insisting that we can do something better so any ideas I have a question I know that there is a distribution related which is quanta quanta how is integrated in your mind well not really because quanta is derived from clopics and now it is just a life dvd that tries to contain all scientific software in deviant and so it's um a little bit as a contact with me and he just draws in what we prepared in the scientific part and so this is contained on this dvd but it's a little bit different approach just this work is like dvd or just installing it on the computer I don't know just this is the best way to support these users I'm not really convinced because I think if you prepare a life dvd you have always continuous working with deviant updates and so you have to you are always busy to work with this I'm more friend of the idea to make things more visible for the user who are interested this dvd has also a large collection of art tools I don't know it is even more than including deviant because there comes from the statistics part and how it's main tool this is what I know about this and there are other life dvd is once I made a list there are also biology related there are I think at least three competing projects which are all in different states it's a problem of a life dvd that you are it is just read only if you prepare this it is not up to date anymore and so I think it is if you want to convince people that there is something and they have something to take at home from the exhibition group but for real work it's not the best choice in my opinion there are also should call the competing project from the bsd site a project that also tries to collect biological software and we have worked down the list of software they have and we cover nearly everything what they have they have some applications more than we but we have as a sum more than they have and I think we should work together here and then also I think it's here in the UK and at any university people build it somehow if I remember right biolinux they take also devion as a base but they found it their biological software themselves I contacted them once or twice how about just taking out packages and they have some issues some special distribution system in their university and they they are not able to explain really consistent why they can't use devion they just switch and work together quality you can use do you think it's what's announced packages anyway or do you think they use I for packaging yes in my opinion we should package everything which is which is both packaging if it's good software and we have it at least one user who wants to use it then this one is packaging because it is for the user who enters the free software world it is impossible to learn what exists and what a huge amount of software is or could be helpful for my application so if you just present in the list it is easy to detect what might be useful for his system instead of just browsing the web and working down 100 Google hits for things he might enter and so it is just to make life easier for those people and so these packages in my opinion is the best idea and it's hooks that we install so can you elaborate on that or how do you see what's going on unfortunately not because I am in a release search or maybe in the search service I think a Debian junior entry in the past and I really like this and I am asked if we can also add a Debian junior kind of a video for little children so there are some games stuff there is a writing program which this project is for small kids it's so complex in learning, typing and so if you are a medical specialist they are trying to build a distribution for the child that's kind of specialist and this Debian junior was in principle the first project with this attempt to support a special user group and I adopted some ideas from them and so I asked from the maintenance of task set to also include Debian mate and it turns in the reverse effect that not Debian mate was added but Debian junior jumped on because they decided this is too specialized to be interesting for the general user and while I agree that this custom distribution might be too specialized I think the general entry point like task set is not really a good one I think modern install systems have some kind of tree you can select if you want in Debian you can select desktop environment and I think this is just stupid because if I I'm a new user and see desktop environment yeah perhaps some user have heard about GNOME or KDE or XFTE or whatever and so I think for those user who know that there is something you should have kind of a tree if they have desktop you click on desktop and get a tree and select your desktop charts I mean it's the same thing with GNOME and KDE those people who know about can just download the KDE city so why shouldn't those people know about Debian mate just download the Debian city yeah but what is the sense of such desktop machine entry I see not really the sense because that's what people who don't know what a desktop is or not interested in any specific yeah okay if I get perhaps a better thing is a database server that's also an entry database server so if people are running a database they have a clear opinion about the database I want to use well yeah I think it should be improved it should be improved but I don't think that in my opinion maybe the better way would be to just add all the custom living distributions to the website I mean I think you would do for example that's that yeah they have all their custom stuff I mean it's not so much on the website and you can just download the CD and I think that entry point is better than trying to snake it into the installer but having it low key then you would still have to tell people well you have to check this point and then down there and somewhere it will pop up and there you can select it because otherwise I don't see it coming if we just have desktop and no desktop then that we make is so out of scope everything else as well I mean I would like of course it's well had I agree with you that we should be more visible on the website but the websites and the problem anyway so we have to discuss with the people to try to get more integration to the front-end like synaptic I'm not sure whether synaptic has tasks prominently yeah this is what I wanted to say there are two different things I'm actually no fan of this task there stuff and moreover the other front-end like aptitude and synaptic should have also more support this is also right so to finish what I mean with tasks I would wish we would have a further and a custom even distribution and if you click on it you can select it's an idea of what it will not be implemented because this idea of a tree is not accepted by joy but ok this and probably will not be accepted in the future so the next point is if you finish tasks you are suggested to run synaptic or aptitude or whatever and then at least at this point we should be anyhow present I have no real idea my suggestion is to use if you use synaptics you can do some like you like special search and you search for made minus and then you get all the made packages but this is a kind of this is not what it was would be them in text yes we can also use depth text are you using these? not yet but we should find some time to use it depth text is a really nice technique which just depth text is kind of a library you can to how to size packages you can categorize under different aspects the aspect can be a programming language user interface also an aspect is interesting for medicine and synaptics can work based on this depth text I did not try but I it is an interesting thing we should definitely deal with this depth text and many of the medical the packages that are inside them are just depth text so we could work with it for the website I think we should definitely enforce people to enhance the website I can't do it because I want to focus here I really hope that somebody will go on and perhaps even put some money on it and say we need some web designers we not need a nice shiny website but we need a functional website and we need a website where people can find such key points and this is not the question of the color of the fonts but we need somebody who does a really good web design for instance you can gain some fortune from Debian fonts or whatever just to get something out which is a modern web design and we should find a way to be present and visible for the good cause I am also present maybe I listed earlier but do you also master cities for that in me? I think it is currently not the worst effort because it is too less people who are interested can currently use these meta packages but it is too much it would be much easier I think if you can point people to one easel they could download and then it would automatically get this I am afraid if people are here they will admit I think it is ready especially so you can manage the medical practices when I had last year at Linux it was invited by a company and it was sponsored by Chip and so I had my talk and then afterwards I asked the person who sponsored this talk if you liked it and he said well no I have not yet to talk I had some different business but it was not interesting because we were talking just about medical practice management and this is exactly what I am not most talking about because it wasn't so people have normally a very great misconception about they were I have in my talk the top 10 misconceptions about they were made and on top of this they were made is just very good practice management and so if people come with the expectation to get this master city and get the medical practice management system see there is nothing like that I think they they just learn that they were made is nothing for their business and for the future and so I am a little bit I think in 2 years we can prove this and perhaps there is something and then we can catch people better than providing something they do not expect maybe I am wrong but this is a reason I have not to use this city for a moment to sign 10 minutes left also 15 there are no further questions we can go hacking again I am here for the whole week if there are some more questions I would be happy if I would see you show up in the middle if you have some some research done on the processing system or find some new we can at least put it on how to do this and it is also very helpful if we learn which projects are worth for packaging this is also a very valuable information we need to do not spend time on systems that are not worth effort I just found one project which was called TK Family Practice and it was from the author announced that it was great and he is fully managing the practice with the system then I downloaded the tarpaul which was 85 megabytes large this was quite large 4 years ago and this project was written in Tickle and the main source code was about 500 kilobytes and in this tarpaul was a complete process for a server in source, in project code and executable and 10 other projects just merged together and put them in tarpaul and you should install it on your machine this absolutely does not fit the standard quality and the program itself was it was like that I would say other doctors I can't understand what this project is doing so this is a problem you will face in different projects that people start programming things for their personal issues for personal tasks and do not think about the general design and so which is needed if you try to to get your project worldwide so if you are able to find something which fits this or you can come back to me and probably you can look for something I know and I can repeat it so I think we should finish at this point and it was nice to see at least some people