This article explains how you can upgrade your existing touch screen hardware to the Linux operating system, Ubuntu. If you are reading this, it is likely you have scanned the code on one of our upgrade USB device, but if you haven’t and want one please get in touch
WARNING This process completely wipes the previous installation and all data will be lost. This should not be an issue for a touch screen, but for this reason we strongly recommend not plugging the USB device into any PC you value!
Getting started
What you will need:
A touchscreen
A USB Keyboard
One of our USB Upgrade devices
About an hour for the upgrade to run
1. Turn the screen off.
2. Plug the keyboard into one of the spare ports on the USB device.
3. Next, insert the USB device into the port at the bottom of your screen. We’re showing one of our Engage touchscreens here, but you can use any accessible USB port on your third party hardware.
(Tip: If you have a choice and the port has a blue connector inside it, use that one. These ports are higher speed and the upgrade will take a little less time to run.)
4. Turn the screen back on.
Booting from the USB Device
This is the trickiest part of the process to navigate. Your screen will be set up to try and boot first off the internal hard disk and ignore any external devices (Security best practice).
What we need to do is tell it to boot from the USB device you’ve just plugged in. Although what you see on the screen may vary, the process is likely very similar whatever hardware you have. Considering the long life of some of our Engage hardware, things will look different on our screens as well, so we’ll try to generalise.
The thing that tells a computer how to start is its Built In Operating System (BIOS). That’s what shows the various messages you see before the Windows loading spinner comes up. Normally, you can enter the boot menu by hitting a function key as the computer starts up; examples of a few are shown below.
You may receive a password prompt at this stage. If it’s Engage hardware, it is set to T0uch13 as a default (That’s T, Zero, u, c, h, one, three). If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to talk to your IT provider. | |
The boot menu you now see will again vary between systems but you want to select General USB which is our upgrade device. | |
The system will now start the upgrade process, starting with a screen that looks like this. | |
It’ll take up to an hour to run, depending on hardware and internet speeds, but when it’s complete it’ll reboot into this screen. |
Final setup
Go into your management console and head to the “Appointment Arrivals/Touchscreens” section to enter the pairing code displayed on the screen. If you’ve upgraded an old installation, you’ll probably need to “Reset Touchscreen” first.
Once you hit “Save” at the foot of the page, the screen will flip to be ready for use. Run though a test arrival to make sure that the screen is responding to touch correctly.
Installing the Engage Agent onto a User PC
If the test arrival fails, we may need to get the Engage Agent installed onto a User PC which is switched on/logged in each day the surgery is open. Its best to install this with Admin rights, so usually requires IT to do this.
The guide is linked below which also contains the software download link
https://support.engagehealth.uk/a/solutions/articles/48001261559