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.

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.

One of the new features in Fedora 13 is the automatic installation of printer drivers when USB printers are connected.  For this feature to work, specific information about each printer model needs to be stored in the relevant driver packages.  Some of this is done but we need your help to test it and to collect more Device ID strings.

Please come along and join in!

Changes affecting the main application:

• The my-default-printer application has been removed.
• Printer drivers are automatically installed when possible.
• Switched to GtkBuilder instead of glade.
• Support for PolKit now assumes polkit-1 so the –with-polkit-1 configure option has been removed.
• The basic/advanced server settings dialogs have been merged.
• PPDs are now fetched asynchronously.
• The outputorder job option is now shown.
• There are now tooltips for the Test Page buttons.
• The device-location attribute is used if present when adding a new queue.
• “Copy” has been renamed “Duplicate”.
• Better icons are used.
• Support for installing HP’s proprietary plug-in has been removed.
• The hpcups PPDs requiring a plugin are now treated as 3rd party proprietary.

Changes affecting the job viewer:

• Job operations can now be applied to several jobs at once.
• Job attributes may be viewed.
• Jobs can now be moved between printers.
• The cups-missing-filter error is now translated.
• Job history can now be purged.
• The job context “Cancel” operation has been made localizable.
• Job files can be retrieved.
• Job completion notifications have been reinstated but with better text.
• It is more obvious in the job viewer when a printer has been disabled.

Changes affecting the troubleshooter:

• The troubleshooter now performs SELinux file context checks.
• The wording in the troubleshooter has been improved.

Did you know that you can edit an existing test update?  Doing this keeps the list of fixed bugs, keeps any user comments about the update, and keeps the karma from previous testing.

After clicking Edit, make your changes but be sure to choose Testing or Stable for the Request field.

So, for my own reference as much as anything else, here is how to map an encrypted logical volume back to an actual disk partition.

Take a look at the mounted devices with “mount”.  In my case, I can see that /dev/mapper/vg_worm01-LogVol00 is mounted at the filesystem root /.  This logical volume belongs to a volume group vg_worm01 (it’s right there in the name).

Next, take a look at which physical volumes are collected into this volume group using “pvdisplay”.  For me, that’s just one: /dev/dm-1.

Finally, “cryptsetup status /dev/dm-1″ says which actual device underlies the whole lot: /dev/sda3.

The 3.9.10 release contains a completely re-written print filter, 27 thousand lines of new code, all of it written by HP with no outside review.  There is no public source code repository for HPLIP so 3.9.10 is the first time this code has seen the light of day.