Next Previous Contents

10. Future

The first steps are done in the form of metapackages which can be used to install medical software. Developers and upstream authors have been encouraged to package additional medical software which is not yet available in Debian. More packages are visible on the horizon.

Moreover there are documents written and the requirements for a user menu structure are fixed, waiting for the new implementation of the Debian menu system. The interest regarding the Debian-Med project was increased by giving several talks.

On the one hand this attracted developers of free medical software projects. They hope for an increasing popularity of their project while Debian-Med lives from the work of those developers. Thus a kind of symbiosis can be observed.

On the other hand there is an increasing interest from users who partially offered to help regarding to their skills. In this way Debian-Med is kind of a link between developers and users.

So the first version of Debian-Med will be included in the next stable Debian release, code-named Sarge. This does not mean that Sarge will be fit to solve all medical tasks, because this depends mainly on the state of the quality of the upstream developed software. But the goal is to have several kinds of software packaged for evaluation and testing at least.

Moreover a Knoppix-based Live-CD already serves as a tool for easy demonstration of the power of Debian-Med.


Next Previous Contents