This Thursday (March 25th) is when a Printing Test Day is being held for Fedora.  This is an opportunity to check that printing will work with your printer in Fedora 13, and to help find bugs to be fixed before release date.

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!

Fedora package developers very often submit a test update for a package, get some feedback on it, then submit another test update incorporating further fixes.  This resets the “karma” back to zero, as well as making search results for packages in the Fedora Update system very cluttered.

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.

I’m about to try installing a Fedora 12 test image onto the spare disk partition in this computer, but it’s taken me a while to work out which partition actually is spare. The reason: most of my filesystems are in logical volumes on LUKS-encrypted devices.

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.

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The newest stable branch of CUPS, 1.4, has a different job cancellation behaviour (hey, two words in a row spelt differently in American English!) than 1.3 did.  If you have cancelled a job but it still appears in the job queue, this might explain why.

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The latest release of Fedora allows more flexibility with configuring print queues and managing print jobs. This is because it is now able to use PolicyKit to do these things, which means you get to choose when and whether users should be prompted for authentication when performing administration tasks on printers or jobs. The implementation is slightly tricky, so I’ll explain the details.

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