Re: Open Hospital on FreeBSD

Am 2025-04-16 19:28, schrieb Katherine Mcmillan:

> Hello all,
> 
> I want to run Open Hospital on FreeBSD.  It currently runs well on 
> several Linux distros, but I want it to run on FreeBSD, and it is 
> missing 6 dependencies (I could list those but I think that members of 
> this community can discover those quickly on their own if interested).  
> I thought that I could take this on as a sort of "introduction to 
> porting" project, even for GSoC, but I am really not confident in my 
> ability to correct even one missing dependency, let alone six.  I know 
> that extra care/caution is needed as it is a tool for healthcare.
> 
> Are there any community members that could provide a consulting quote 
> for a project like that?

I had a quick look at it. OH is a java application. If I read it 
correctly, the WEB-UI (which would be installed on a server) is a work 
in progress. If I get it correctly 
(https://github.com/informatici/openhospital-doc/blob/master/doc_admin/AdminManual.adoc) 
section 2.1), the GUI would be installed on a client system (laptop or 
PC), and it would connect to a "simple" DB server (on a server). They 
recommend MariaDB or MySQL. Both are available as FreeBSD packages.

So for the "OH Client install" you would need one of the DBs installed 
on a FreeBSD system (section 2.1.3, the OH linux or windows download 
there is only necessary to get the SQL scripts which populate the DB 
with all the tables, indexes, constraints and whatvever for the client 
to connect to it), and if we assume a typical Windows client, the 
windows version of OH which then connects to the FreeBSD DB server. 
Nothing to port in this case to FreeBSD, as the "server side" of OH 
seems to be the initial creation of the DB.

If you want to use FreeBSD on the client PCs/laptops to not have to pay 
Windows licenses, there are two options. You install a suitable java 
version as a FreeBSD package, and then download the OH linux versions 
and use that. As OH is a java program, this should work, maybe you need 
to adapt the oh.sh script. As you would need to setup FreeBSD with a 
graphical desktop environment before that, the person doing that needs 
some level of unix/FreeBSD knowledge anyway, and this amount of 
knowledge may already be enough to handle an adaption. Or as a second 
option, you take the linux download and make a FreeBSD package out of 
it. The last may only need a dependency on java, I see no other 
dependencies listed in the OH docs. Feel free to point out if I'm wrong, 
I may have not looked at right places.

To compile the java source code to a java program, more dependencies may 
be needed than just java, but this doesn't seem necessary here (I have 
more than one java program ported to the FreeBSD Ports Collection by 
taking the linux downloads and simply adapting the start scripts to "the 
FreeBSD way", no need to compile the java programs on FreeBSD).

If you have some more questions or stumble upon some specific issues 
while trying one of the scenarios above, feel free to ask here. This 
case looks simple enough to get this working by simply downloading the 
linux version and giving it a try (you need to have someone who is able 
to install a DB server and create the initial DB from the OH SQL files; 
if you need someone doing this for you, any local IT student should be 
able to handle that with the FreeBSD handbook and the info which is in 
the OH docs... on an existing FreeBSD system for an IT student with 
experience maybe a 1-2h task, for one without experience maybe a 1-2 day 
task).

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
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