A great OSCAR HOW-TO
Well, i wish I’d found this site that explains How To Install OSCAR CMS on Ubuntu 2 days ago (before spending aforementioned time on tinkering with OSCAR myself, with little success.) Here is a locally saved copy of the file: oscar-installation-guide
Well, here goes… I’m going to try installing it on a Virtual Machine (again, my primary goal is to use it as billing software for my out-of-clinic billings). And maybe I can convince my office to use it (as AbelMed, that we are using now, is painful. The more I use it, the more I dislike it).
It’s 14:50. How quickly can I (who has never done this before) get a working EMR set up? Check back here… hopefully soon… :)
If I’m really adventurous, I may post the VM image here for people to play with!
16:00 – Well, I’ve already had my first hiccup. I created a Virtual Machine container with the help of EasyVMX. (My file is here: ubuntu_oscar, but create one yourself, it’s easy!). I already had VMWare Player installed from my trials this weekend, as well as the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server iso saved on my disk. (You can Download Ubuntu here). I was at first using Ubuntu 8.10 but the LTS is better for this kind of setup – I don’t want to be upgrading / updating my system too often, and the LTS has guaranteed support for patches etc. so I don’t have to worry for a few years.
Anyway, I was installing the image, but the VM wouldn’t connect to my network. Not sure why. Rebooted, seems to be working OK. Also, I can’t seem to figure out how to get the VM to boot from the CD drive instead of the HDD (i.e. if I want to re-install the system.) Oh well.
NB this hiccup was a pure VM issue, if I was installing this on dedicated hardware, it wouldn’t have happened (although something else may have).
Anyway, I installed a completely vanilla Ubuntu Server install (no optional packages). Now I’m patiently waiting for apt-get to update the system, but it’s otherwise running just fine.
17:20 – *whew*, apt finished all the updates, I organized some of my old documents while it was working. Rebooting, and all done that part. Getting some dinner – be back in a bit.
17:50 – OK, I’m back. Made the config changes recommended in the HOWTO; now I’m just going to backup my VM in case I want to install a different version of OSCAR or something.
19:00 – The source may take “a few minutes” to download? An hour I guess could be defined as “a few minutes”… *sigh*
20:30 – Success! My first login to my very own OSCAR build! It didn’t quite take forever… but still pretty long. Time to play around a bit…
23:55 – OK, time to go to bed. I had to backtrack and instead of using the latest CVS version (should have known it would be buggy – I couldn’t get the E-chart working correctly with it), I went back to the most recent ’stable’ release (Dec 5, 2008). Now it works like a charm!!
So, half a day, and a working EMR. To be sure, some tweaks need to still be done (E-Forms? Providers? Billing sheets?) but it’s up and running!
Ah, FLOSS sofware… it’s AWESOME!
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