Dental Software

[Sigurd]

Hi,
Is there any software for a dentist to manage his office working with Kubuntu OS?
Kind regards
Sigurd

[TWPonKubuntu]

I ran a simple search (Non-Google) on the phrase "Linux dental software" and got multiple hits (7+ pages, 100+ hits). Some are older. Some are currently being maintained. Some are for AI (Artificial Intelligence) software which I would recommend avoiding simply on principle and privacy concerns.

My search URL: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch...nguage=english

Not being a dentist, I cannot recommend any particular software, so make your own evaluation.

TWP

[GreyGeek]

Nice search, TWPonKubuntu!!
I was curious and started browsing the very extensive list. On the first page I found this, about "ClearDental". It was built using Kubuntu. Interestingly, the creator of that software is a software engineer who later became a dentist. However, "ClearDenatal" is not ready for mainstream use.

The doctor uses it at his practice. Here it is in action. It brings back fond memories because I used the Qt API 4.0 and onward to develop software for almost a decade:

[Sigurd]

Thank you for your help. It is very young. But this is what I was looking for. And I guess it is not yet available in German language.
Kind regards
Sigurd

[GreyGeek]

Thank you for your help. It is very young. But this is what I was looking for. And I guess it is not yet available in German language.
Kind regards
Sigurd

Unfortunately the author of ClearDental didn't know about (or use) the Qt translate function. It allows a user to chose a language for an application and all the text and labels in the application are converted to the language of choice. That technique is often referred to as "I18N" (because there are 18 letters between I and N in InternationalizatioN. There are several methods described here and they can look sometime like this:

QPushButton hello(QPushButton::tr("Hello world!"));
"Creates a push button that displays "Hello world!". If hellotr_la.qm was found and contains a translation for "Hello world!", the translation appears; if not, the source text appears. lupdate is used to create and update the message files (hellotr_la.ts in this case) to keep them in sync with the source code. It is safe to run lupdate at any time, as lupdate does not remove any information. For example, you can put it in the makefile, so the TS files are updated whenever the source changes. "

or, for QML based code:

Text {
id: txt1
text: qsTr("Hello World!")
}

The label "Hello World!" would be translated into the chosen language during compilation or the application of

Fortunately, the source code for ClearDental is OpenSource and freely and easily available:
https://gitlab.com/cleardental
However, the insurance codes are for American Insurances and they may not reflect insurances in other countries.

There are several other Dental applications given in the search results that run on Linux. Some are open source and free or very affordable. I only mentioned the first in the search list because a dentist wrote the application for his own practice.

[Sigurd]

Hi,
I am in touch with Dr. Shah in Boston. He has sent me a link and I've dowloaded the file "ClearDentalVM.ova". With ark I have unpacked it and I got three files "ClearDentalVM-disk001.vmdk", "ClearDentalVM.mf" and "ClearDentalVM.ovf". These files are made to run in a virtual machine.
I never have created a virtual machine. How can I do that and run these files in it?
Kind regards
Sigurd

[Sigurd]

Okay, I have installed Oracle Virtualbox and I could see the files.

[GreyGeek]

Okay, I have installed Oracle Virtualbox and I could see the files.

IF you are running Kubuntu (or some Debian or Ubuntu derivative) you can install virt-manager. It will also install qemu-system and all associated software necessary to create a GUI interface to the kernel virtual machine. Oracle's Virtualbox requires an additional utility app to be installed to allow full screen capability and other features that virt-manager includes automatically. After installation it will supply a GUI interface to any OS installed on the KVM.

A type 1 hypervisor is on bare metal. VM resources are scheduled directly to the hardware by the hypervisor. KVM is an example of a type 1 hypervisor. KVM was merged into the Linux® kernel in 2007, so if you're using a modern version of Linux, you already have access to KVM. Running an OS via a KVM is as if you installed the OS to the drive itself. OS's installed via KVM reside on a virtual HD, created by the user, of about 20GB or more, depending on what you are doing with VM and how much free disk space you have on your PC. You also set the number of CPU cores you will allow the KVM to use. This also limits how many VM's you can run simultaneously.

A type 2 hypervisor like Oracle's Virtualbox is one which runs on top of the OS, so it is slower because it has to communicate with the underlying hardware through calls to the underlying OS.

If one is running BTRFS as their root file system then they must set the directory in which they store their virtual HD's as nocow (no copy on write). The default directory is /var/lib/libvirt/images, so one would use "sudo chattr +C /var/lib/libvirt/images" while the images folder is empty, i.e., before you create any virtual HDs.

[Sigurd]

Dear GreyGeek,
Thank you very much for your information. Dr. Shah gave me only an overview about his software Clear.Dent. Perhaps I can help a little to bring his software to Germany. In the medical area is almost nothing based on Linux or special on Kubuntu. And more and more people see that Windows is not the future. When I will need help I will come back to you, for sure.
Kind regards,
Sigurd