Ricoh supplies Device IDs

I’ve mentioned before about how the automatic printer driver installation feature in Fedora 13 requires IEEE 1284 Device IDs to be provided by both printer devices and printer drivers so they can be matched together.  I gave a presentation about this at the OpenPrinting Summit in April.

Since then I’ve been helping Ricoh fix the pieces that needed fixing so that their printers will work with automatic printer driver installation.  Impressively, Ricoh has sent me the Device IDs for 785 different devices.  This brings the number of drivers without IDs down to 2,605, or just over 25% of the drivers we ship.  Previously this was nearly 40%.

Not only that, but now the Fedora 13 cups package retrieves Device IDs from Ricoh network printers that do not have support for the Printer MIB standard.  It does this by sending an SNMP query for the “private” Ricoh OID that holds the Device ID string.