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.
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!
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.
Fedora 11 is finally out. The bad news is that there are several known issues (well, known now) with printing. Unfortunately I was tied up with PDF-related security fixes for several months and did not have the time I wanted to spend on polishing Fedora 11.
As part of my work for Red Hat I’ve been working on the printing configuration program, system-config-printer. Fedora 10 came with version 1.0 of this application, which provides a notification area print icon as well as the ability to configure printers, and I made the 1.1 version available earlier this year. The most recent release is 1.1.3.
I’ve taken some screenshots of system-config-printer 1.1, and this version will be in Fedora 11 when it is released this year.
Screenshots below. As an aside, I have to say that taking screenshots is one of the most rapid methods of finding bugs I know!
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