Hello folks
I’m new to OpenEmr, I’ve got a project on this and I’m exploring on this after checking its download page I weirdly wonder that “Why this open source project built only on PHP/Mysql has different OS distributions.”
Any special thinking behind this, and how can I use the windows distribution on Linux
Since PHP code uses MySQL libraries, any platform Windows or Linux variations work. Wiki documentation has details about OS. Due to OS licensing, there are prebuilt Linux images available but WAMP is used by many practices as well.
By answering a question, you create more questions. The answer to your question might be Wine…
Wine is a program that allows Windows fanatics to run Windows programs under Linux. At least it used to be the solution for Linux and Windows software restricted to Windows-system software.
If you want to know why there are different versions of OpenEMR, the answer is that OpenEMR is a Software product that needs a System operating system to work as a basis and there was MS-Dos… ending in Windows 8.1 for now.
And there was Linus Torvalds (?) who thought MSdos was not the answer for computers, and he got many followers creating something that originated from GNU by Richard Stallman to create GNU/Linux.
And after that there were followers who needed something different and created something different, due to the fact that Windows as is, and Linux as is, were not easy to use on some machines, like Tablets and Phones.
Some software will stay and many will go down in history.
Please feel free to search for a better answer in the WIKI-pedia on the WWW.
I believe most of the original coding for the project was designed to run on apache in linux. There are, however, many people in this world who cling to Microsoft Windows, therefore in order to increase accessibility, the code was tweaked to assure compatibility with apache, php, and mysql running on windows OS.
VirtualBox is a program that runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris. I found it fairly easy to install on my Kubuntu linux desktop and then to install Windows 7. I only use that for the few web sites out there that still require Internet Explorer or Silverlight. VirtualBox will also run the OpenEMR appliance http://downloads.sourceforge.net/openemr/OpenEMR-4-1-1-appliance-1.zip
as will vmware (which I found a bit more complex).