[sane-devel] upcoming iscan release

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi all,

Just before I leave on holidays until January 10, 2006, I'd like to
give you all a heads up on the next "Image Scan! for Linux" release.
The exact release date has not been fixed yet, but I think it will
release around December 27, 2005.

iscan-1.18.0 adds support for the Perfection 4490 PHOTO (aka GT-X750)
via yet another binary-only, i386-only plugin.

Under the hood, the plugin mechanism has been changed so that you can
now use the epkowa backend without these non-free plugins.  The iscan
frontend still requires one non-free plugin, though.  While the source
tarball still contains the BLOBs in its non-free/ directory, the RPM
has been split already.  There are now a single core package and seven
plugin packages.  Unless you have an EPSON scanner that needs a plugin
in order to work, the core package suffices.

When compiling from source, you should be able to just

  $ ./configure
  $ make
  $ su -c 'make install'

even on non-i386 architectures.  In that case, the frontend will not
be built and the plugins won't get installed.

BTW, the BLOBs are scheduled for removal from the tarball with the
release after this one.

Hope this helps & Season's Greetings,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                          EPSON AVASYS Corporation, LAN
FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/
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Penguin's lib!       -- I hack, therefore I am --               LPIC-2