August 29th, 2003
The term "news" is not really appropriate for this summary of the
activities around the Debian Med project. However, this is an overview
about the last half year.
All
preformatted slides and MagicPoint sources of the talks mentioned
below are available online.
Andreas Tille had two talks at LinuxTag on March 2 in Chemnitz about Debian Internal Projects and Debian Med. The interest in both talks was great and the subsequent discussion was very prolific.
On March 18 the power of the Debian Med network was proven: Andreas Tille was not able to take part in the EGovOS conference in Washington DC and thus Aaron Ucko held the talk about Debian Med in place of Andreas.
The idea of Debian Med was born in 2001 at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux. This year this event took place in Metz. On July 9 Andreas Tille reported about the progress of the project in the last two years.
Two days later, on July 11, Andreas Tille held a talk at The Free Conference at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe. This talk was visited by more than 100 interested people. The subsequent discussion showed, that physicians as well as computer engineers could be addressed.
By now there exists a paper about Debian Med covering the topics of the current talk in more details. The SGML source as well as a Makefile for creation of different formats is also available.
Andreas Tille has started to build experimental packages of GnuMed. Currently no Packages file is provided which disables easy installation via apt-get. This is intentional because the packages are not yet ready for common use. The reason for providing the packages as they are, is to demonstrate how they might look in the future and how the single tools of the GnuMed suite will be split up between the packages.
Moreover these packages support the work of Sebastian Hilbert who built a Knoppix based live CD with GnuMed.
During the Debian conference a group of developers agreed to rename "Debian Internal Projects" to "Customized Debian Distributions". This makes it more explicit that these projects aim to customize Debian for special user interests.