Printer Device IDs wanted

The new feature in Fedora 13 for installing printer drivers automatically makes it all the more important to have correct IEEE 1284 Device IDs for printers.  Unfortunately many drivers shipped in Fedora do not declare Device IDs for all the printers they support, and some of the ones we do have are wrong.

You can help put this right, whether you are running Fedora 13 Alpha, or Fedora 11/12.

Information on collecting Device IDs is given on the Printing Test Day page but here is a good way of doing it:

  1. Make sure you have the foomatic, gutenprint-cups, and hpijs packages installed
  2. Connect and switch on your printer(s) — yes, even network ones
  3. git clone http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/system-config-printer.git
    cd system-config-printer
    su -c ./check-device-ids.py
  4. If you see “MISSING” in the output, file a bug in Bugzilla against the relevant driver

Incidentally, some statistics on Device IDs in Fedora 13:

  • We have at least 10,100 drivers
  • Of those, over 6,200 have Device IDs associated with them
  • That means we’re missing Device IDs for nearly 40% of all our printer drivers
$ lpinfo -l -m | grep 'device-id = ' | wc -l
10135
$ lpinfo -l -m | grep 'device-id = $' | wc -l
3922

UPDATED: Changed instructions to run check-device-ids.py using su.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

23 responses to “Printer Device IDs wanted”

  1. Taljurf avatar
    Taljurf

    My printer works correctly, but with that test i get:

    [Taljurf@localhost system-config-printer]$ su -c ./check-device-ids.py
    Password:

    If you have not already done so, you may get more results
    by temporarily disabling your firewall (or by allowing
    incoming UDP packets on port 161).

    Examining connected devices
    Installing relevant drivers using system service
    Ignoring exception: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.redhat.PrinterDriversInstaller was not provided by any .service files
    Fetching driver list
    └── HP Photosmart C4500 series (usb): MFG:HP;MDL:Photosmart C4500 series;CMD:MLC,PCL,PML,DW-PCL,DESKJET,DYN;
    (No drivers)

    Do i need to report a bug?

  2. tim avatar

    Taljurf: no need to report a bug in this particular case. I tried it with your printer’s information on Fedora 13 and it spots that hpcups (from HPLIP) provides this IEEE 1284 Device ID. Thanks for reporting the ID though, it was worth checking.

  3. […] mentioned before about how the automatic printer driver installation feature in Fedora 13 requires IEEE 1284 Device […]