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Brian would like your help with the following problem: "I've been asked by a friend who has a small rural medical practice to find him an alternative to his aging UniSys medical billing system. The company wants to charge him an extra $17k to upgrade the system to Y2k compliance and he just doesn't have the money (this is in addition to the normal $5k maintence fee he's been paying). The system is an integral part of his practice because it is needed to handle Medicare/Medicaid billing so it has to be upgraded somehow. If it is replaced he needs some way to port his database over to the new system as well. How can my friend upgrade/replace his system for the least amount of money? Is there a Linux solution? I've tried to search the UniSys webpage, but the company is huge and diverse and the webpage is mostly marketing hype!" "The computers appear to be a 386 host with 3 terminals attached, one to the server and the other 2 to 286 CPUs networked to the server. It has a SCSI drive and SCSI tape backup in it and a modem for communicating with whoever handles the billing (I'm not sure if this is UniSys or some other company). They are relativly small grey vented boxes that look like they snap together (I didn't dig too deep, in fear of totally hosing things up).

The upgrade software offered is Eclipse Open and I think the current SW the system is running is called Eclipse, but I'm not sure (alot of unknowns here I know)."

This seems to be an awfully specialized market, which I don't think Linux has moved into yet. If such things do exist for Linux, then that would be a huge plus, but lets not limit ourselves to just free software with this one.