Re: [tlug] centos5 printing -- solved -- driver news

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Shawn writes:

 > The Linux Foundation (LF), today announced the availability of the Linux
 > Standard Base Driver Development Kit (LSB DDK) for print drivers.

 > The DDK provides ...a web API ...[which] will be supported by all major
 > Linux distributions and will allow Linux printer setup tools to
 > automatically find and download printer driver packages, even when there
 > is no local driver available in the distribution.

But finding drivers is generally not a problem; Gutenprint and CUPS
provide a very wide variety.  The problem is that Canon and Epson
don't get open source, so their drivers are often unusable, and the
specs are not easily available to developers so that the drivers can
only be improved by specialists.  Eg, the Canon MP500 PPD distributed
with Mac OS X is about 350KB, most of it is opaque (BASE64-encoded),
and it hard-codes a lot of internal Mac OS X paths in /Library and
/System, so you can't just drop it in on a Linux installation.  By
comparison, the Gutenprint version is 35KB, but it can't print the
CUPS test page correctly.

This isn't going to change.