10 Oct 2000 gtaylor   » (Master)

My wife is sick again; evidently from the cold snap we're having. We just saw my father-in-law off; he was visiting from Rome, where he now works.

I finally got the tape drive from VA Linux all plugged in and running; tomorrow I'll establish a sensible backup regimen and that will be that. Thanks, VA! Now if only they would send my the check they owe me...

LinuxPrinting.org

So I've decided to move the site out of my house and off my cable modem. To that end, I've found an inexpensive colocation place halfway between home and office, and ordered a 1U rackmount box. I was unable to find one with Debian preinstalled, so I'll have to wipe it when it comes and do an fresh install to get rid of Red Hat. Hmm. We've made progress, and yet the end result is the same...

I've run my LinuxPrinting.org-branded certification idea past two printer vendors now, and gotten about 0.75 interested vendors between them. This number is non-zero, but it'll be tricky to work it up into an operable program by the end of the week (!) as was my original goal. The program, in a nutshell, was to certify printers as supported by free software through straightforward experimentation and in accordance with the "perfection" criteria already in force in my compatibility listings. The output for vendors would be a logo to stamp on the box, a whitepaper detailing software and configuration methods for the printer, and some sort of highlighting on the website. The intent is for this process to be lightweight enough to offer quick turnaround, and for it to bring in enough money and printers to pay for itself and fund free software developers.

Among the things mentioned by one vendor was the fact that all the big-name Linux distributions are now happy to include proprietary driver software (this vendor has specifically asked each distributor multiple times, and while last year it wasn't so, this year it is). Printer vendors may therefore view traditional Windows-grade driver support as sufficient, since that will ship with the Red Hats of the world.

I find this situation most unsatisfying.

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