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.

For those of you interested in participating in system-config-printer development, I invite you to join the new mailing list.

I’ve just released version 1.2.1 of system-config-printer.  One of the changes is that it now uses the D-Bus API of the Fedora firewall tool to actually make firewall adjustments that it needs.

Just a quick note that I’ll be presenting by phone today, Thursday 15th April, at the OpenPrinting Summit on the topic of automatic printer driver installation in Fedora 13.  The talk is at 1600 UTC / 1700 BST, and was not Wednesday as scheduled.  The schedule hasn’t been updated yet, but when it is you can find it and the dial-in information here.

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.

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