Opendental 6.0 (svn) running in openSUSE 11.0

[mateit]

Opendental (Open Dental Software - Open Source Practice Management) is a dental practice management software, relesead under GPL. I'll try to be as concise as possible in showing the necessary steps to get it running under openSUSE 11.0 64bit edition, though it should be just the same for 32bit version.

1. Add to your Software Repositories the following repos:
i/ ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/download-stable/openSUSE_11.0/ - for the latest Mono packages
ii/I'm assuming that you've already configured your system to get the latest updates from the official repos and any other desired package from Packman repo or similar.

2. Start Software Management and search for the following: make, nant, mono-core/-complete/-devel/-winforms (I'm not sure which one is not needed so in my case I've just selected everything mono* to be on the safe side), kdesvn, mysql server and mysql-client.

3. Start Konqueror and mkdir a directory in your home directory (~) in which your Opendental software will be built - let's say opendental.

4. Right-click opendental directory and then Actions -> Subversion (kdesvn) -> Checkout from a repository...

5. In the newly opened window at the Enter URL line type: https://70.90.133.65:23793/svn/opendental/opendental6.0 ; the Select target directory should already be filled in with your opendental directory full path.

6. Make sure you've checked the HEAD in the Select version part. The just click OK.

7. In your opendental directory you will now have a new one called opendental6.0. Start a terminal, cd to opendental6.0 and just type make.

8. If it ends up with some errors just check the Makefile file from the same directory to look just like this one:
#!/bin/make

default:
mdtool build --buildfilepenDental6_0.sln

9. After a few minutes you must have compiled the binaries. You will find the main executable in ~/opendental/opendental6.0/OpenDental/bin/Debug as OpenDental.exe.

10. Before starting Opendental you must configure MySQL server: either from the terminal 'rcmysql start' or from YaST2 -> System -> System Services; then from the terminal type the followin to create the actual opendental database which I called opendental :-). Thanks to Amarok developers who 'inspired' me at this step - I'm no programmer so everything I do in this matter is more of a search-copy-adapt-modify-paste business. You could find the entire document at MySQL HowTo - Amarok Wiki. So here it goes (type this in a terminal):
mysql -u root
set password for root@localhost = password('xxxxxxx');
flush privileges;
quit;
The xxxxxxx part (without '') will be replaced by whatever password you desire. Then:
mysql -p -u root
CREATE DATABASE opendental;
USE opendental;
GRANT ALL ON opendental.* TO opendental@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'zzzzzzzz';
The last line starts at GRANT and finishes at ;. Of course replace zzzzzzz with a password for the newly created opendental database.

11. Point your browser to Using Open Dental and follow the instructions there, except your final opendental.sql file must begin like this:

/*
create database opendental
*/

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
use opendental;

Then, again from a terminal, type:
mysql -p -h localhost -u opendental < _path_to_opendental.sql
Enter the password from the zzzzzzz part :-). Now everything should be set (depending on the case you may need to adjust your firewall to allow mysql connections - try from YaST2).
12. start a terminal and type:
mono ~/opendental/opendental6.0/OpenDental/bin/Debug/OpenDental.exe
In the Choose Database window you should have the following:
- Server Name: localhost
- DataBase: opendental
- User: opendental
- Password: _that_zzzzzzz_password
Then click OK and ther you have it.

I'd like to point that at least on my computers it feels way faster than the Windows version running on identical hardware.
I would like to thank the following people/entities for allowing me to run this great and very useful software:
- gnu.org
- each and every developer behind Linux kernel, KDE, Firefox project, openSUSE and Mono project
- open-dent.com developers and THE man who initiated Opendental dr.Jordan Sparks
I hope you will find this howto useful and if there is anything wrong/unclear just let me konw.
Here is a small list of useful url's regarding this issue:
Open Dental Software Manual - Developers
Open Dental Software Manual - C#, Linux, and Macintosh
Getting Started with Open Dental on Ubuntu Linux
Using Open Dental
MySQL HowTo - Amarok Wiki

[xoulis]

This is what I was looking for!!! Well done!!!
Many thanks!

[Pantera91lego]

Excuse me, I am a new user and unfortunately I am not able to understand all the things that you have written. The first problem that I have is that I can't understand which packages I have to install, you suggested to install all the packages contaning "mono", but there are a lot of useless packages in that list I think and even though I try to install them I am not able to do it because they go in conflict .
Could you be a little bit more precise about which packages need to be installed?
Thank you very much,
Roberto

[mateit]

Sorry for the late answer. As I said I'm not sure which ones are needed for certain - just try and install the most 'obvious' ones first (mono, mono-base, etc) and try them. But as I recall there were no conflicts whatsoever (do not install the src and debug pkgs). Please share your experience with this software.