Test Day:2010-03-25 Printing

What to test?
Today's instalment of Fedora Test Day will focus on printing, and specifically on Automatic Print Driver Installation.

If you come to this page after the test day is completed (or even before), your testing is still valuable and you can use the information on this page to test with your printer and provide feedback.

Who's available
The following cast of characters will be available testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion ...
 * Development - Tim Waugh (IRC: twaugh) 09:00 -- 17:00 UTC
 * Development - Jiri Popelka (IRC: jpopelka) 10:00 -- 18:00 UTC
 * Quality Assurance - Yulia Kopkova (IRC: ykopkova) 11:00 -- 18:00 UTC

Prerequisite for Test Day

 * A system with a network connection (for automatic driver installation)
 * A printer
 * Fedora 13 Alpha (or newer; live image is fine - see below)

Update your machine
If you're running Fedora 13, make sure you have all the current updates for it installed, using the update manager. If you want to try Rawhide, see the instructions on the Rawhide page on the various ways in which you can install or update to Rawhide. Or:

Live image
Optionally, you may download a non-destructive Rawhide live image for your architecture. Tips on using a live image are available at FedoraLiveCD. Live images are available for the Fedora 13 Beta 'test compose' and also daily generated live images of Fedora 13.

Debugging / filing bugs
Some tips on debugging printing problems can be found on this wiki page.

Testing automated driver installation
Start with the printer disconnected from the computer.

To test automatic printer driver installation, make sure to remove these packages first:



When the printer is connected you should be shown a prompt to install whichever packages are required for that model. After clicking "Install" the queue should be created and a notification will be shown about it.

Note that automatic printer driver installation support in KDE requires updates-testing and  packages. See bug #576615 and bug #576660.

Printing testing
Here are some things to look at:


 * Use a new printer for the first time
 * Reconnect a printer you have used before
 * Use a network printer
 * Complicated printing tasks: duplex, n-up, special paper, ...
 * Problems: paper jam, low ink, ...

Device ID checking
THIS IS IMPORTANT!

We urgently need to know the Device ID of your printer.

A printer has its own model-specific Device ID (a key:value string with MFG, MDL and CMD fields), and a printer driver has a list of Device IDs for printers it can drive. It is certainly the case that there are printer drivers with missing or incorrect Device IDs.

A script to help fix this is provided in the system-config-printer package and can be run like this:

python /usr/share/system-config-printer/check-device-ids.py

It will prompt you for your root password because CUPS requires administrative authentication in order to provide a list of attached devices. It will list printers physically connected to your computer, and SNMP-aware printers on the local network provided you unblock UDP port 161 using.

You should get output like this:

Fetching driver list └── HP DESKJET 990C: MFG:HEWLETT-PACKARD;MDL:DESKJET 990C;CMD:MLC,PCL,PML; ├── drv:///hp/hpcups.drv/hp-deskjet_990c.ppd [/usr/share/cups/drv/hp/hpcups.drv] ├── foomatic:HP-DeskJet_990C-cdj550.ppd [/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic] ├── foomatic:HP-DeskJet_990C-chp2200.ppd [/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic] ├── foomatic:HP-DeskJet_990C-hpijs.ppd [/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic] └── foomatic:HP-DeskJet_990C-pcl3.ppd [/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic] MISSING gutenprint.5.2://hp-dj_990c/expert [/usr/lib/cups/driver/gutenprint.5.2] MISSING gutenprint.5.2://hp-dj_990c/simple [/usr/lib/cups/driver/gutenprint.5.2]

The "MFG:...;MDL:...;CMD:...;" part is the Device ID for this printer and the lines below it are the drivers which have been identified for it. The package or filename providing this driver is shown in [brackets] after it.

If the driver which should be used for this printer is not listed, or you get a line saying "MISSING", please file a bug against that driver quoting the Device ID. For example, the above output would indicate that the gutenprint driver ought to report that Device ID but does not.

If you cannot run check-device-ids.py for any reason, use this to fetch the Device ID from CUPS:

su -c 'lpinfo --exclude-schemes=dnssd,hal -l -v'

Test Results
Please report all bugs into Bugzilla against the appropriate component:


 * For problems involving the printer status icon, the configuration tool, or automatically created queues, file bugs against system-config-printer
 * For problems using the File->Print.. dialog, file bugs against the application or (if the GTK+ print dialog is being used) against gtk2
 * For bugs in particular drivers, file bugs against them e.g. hplip, gutenprint, foomatic, cups
 * If still unsure, file bugs against cups (or ask on IRC)

Printing testing
Please try any of the test cases you feel able to, and mark the boxes with the word PASS if everything worked perfectly or FAIL if you had problems. If you can't carry out a particular test (e.g. connect/reconnect a network printer), mark the box with N/A.

It would be useful to have extra information about what worked or what didn't -- see the example row for how to add references.

Device IDs
To report missing or incorrect Device IDs found by using the check-device-ids script, please use the table below.

Please note: there is no need to add entries to this table if the Device ID is present and correct in the relevant drivers.