blog.kfish.org

My name is Conrad Parker, and I live in Kyoto, Japan. I work with Renesas in Tokyo, designing the Linux multimedia architecture for a new line of mobile processors; and for Wikimedia Foundation, working on Ogg integration for Mozilla Firefox. I am also working towards a PhD in Computer Science at Kyoto University. Free software projects include the Sweep sound editor and the Annodex media system, and various smaller ones that you can read about here.

Saturday, 1 January 2005

Epson R210 and Ubuntu Hoary

I bought an Epson R210 inkjet printer yesterday, and it worked fine after an upgrade from Ubuntu Warty to Ubuntu Hoary.

However, in the process I came across the quite pleasing site of the Epson Kowa Corporation, complete with very frequent Linux driver releases and a not-entirely-vacuous company profile. Before downloading the driver, I was presented with a web page asking for acceptance of their licensing terms: a combination of GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, and Epson Kowa Public License. I was astonished to find that the tarball of their CUPS driver was the real deal: a source tarball built with automake, autoconf and libtool, and containing a beautiful mess of GNUish artefacts: AUTHORS, various COPYING files, a generic INSTALL file, a ChangeLog that hadn't been updated since 2002 and a zero-length NEWS file. Truly beautiful software from a company with real clue ;-)