GT.M Acculturation live CD available

The GT.M Acculturation live CD is a Linux live CD aimed at those who would like to learn about GT.M. It is a tutorial with examples and exercises focusing on the differences between GT.M and other implementations of M. In view of the fact that these differences are mostly in the area of administrations and operations, reflecting GT.M's emphasis as a platform for secure, mission critical, production applications, that is the focus.

The live CD is a remastering of Morphix KDE 0.4-1 (http://www.morphix.org - thanks, alextreme!) and is a Linux distribution that boots and runs entirely off the CD. The hard drive on the PC is untouched, and indeed, a hard drive is not needed to run a Linux live CD.

Instructions for use are on the CD, so download it, burn it, boot it, and use it! You can also use it to port and demonstrate your own applications running on GT.M.

Since read/write access for a GT.M database cannot be provided on a CD, read/write storage is required with the GT.M Acculturation live CD for the exercises. This storage can be provided in one of two ways: a 512MB USB flash drive (also referred to as a jump drive or thumb drive) or other USB storage; or a partition on an IDE or SCSI hard drive with at least 400MB storage. In the latter case, the partition can have a Linux file system, or a FAT file system, but not an NTFS file system (if the partition has an NTFS file system, it will need to be reformatted, and data therein will be overwritten).

The GT.M Acculturation Workshop can also be used to install Linux (a somewhat dated Linux by the standards of 2005, but it is a Debian GNU/Linux distribution and can be easily updated online). GT.M V5.0-FT01 is included, as is the VistA healthcare information system application of the US Department of Veterans Affairs as released on February 12, 2005 (which is in the public domain through the Freedom of Information Act). VistA is simply a sample application for the examples and exercises - no knowledge of VistA is required to use the CD.

Please use the Help forum at the GT.M project page at Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sanchez-gtm) to request assistance and to provide feedback. The CD can also be downloaded from the project page.

The GT.M Acculturation live CD is still a work in progress, but there is enough material here to be both substantive and useful.

-- Bhaskar