OpenPrinting
We have resources to help with printing under free operating systems like GNU/Linux and the BSDs or under commercial UNIX-like systems such as Solaris and Mac OS X. Looking for configuration or driver help? Try our CUPS Quick Start or look for your printer in the OpenPrinting Database. For more detail, try Till's Tutorial. If all else fails, ask a human in the forums. Researching a printer purchase? Simply browse our database. Looking for software? We host Foomatic, printer driver packages, and some other programs. Want to help? Here's how.
OpenPrinting is participating in Google Summer of Code 2013
The deadline for student applications for this year's Google Summer of Code has passed and we got good student applications for at least some of the project ideas we have offered. From now on until May 27 we will decide who of the candidates will work for us and assign mentors to them.
Thank you very much to everyone who has applied.
See past Openprinting GSoC News »
OpenPrinting Summit 2013 together with PWG Meeting at Apple in Cupertino on May 14-17
Our annual meeting, the OpenPrinting Summit is approaching! This time it is again held together with the PWG (Printing Working Group) Meeting at Apple in Cupertino. We invite again printer manufacturers, developers of Linux printing components as CUPS, Ghostscript, Color Management, desktops, applications, of Linux distributions, ... to plan and discuss on making printing under Linux "just work". This time the sessions are integrated with the sessions of the PWG, an OS-independent standardization organization for digital printing.
See the OpenPrinting Summit web page.
PDF as standard print job format is completely implemented on Debian and Ubuntu and will soon get upstream standard
From Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10, released mid-October) on all important desktop applications (GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE, LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) send print jobs in PDF and not in PostScript any more by default. In addition, a complete CUPS filter chain to process print jobs in PDF is available and used by Debian and Ubuntu.
CUPS author Mike Sweet/Apple have decided to not include the Linux-specific CUPS filters in the upstream CUPS source any more and we have agreed to maintain them at OpenPrinting. Here we will do some clean-up and discontinue the PostScript-centric workflow in favor of the PDF workflow, meaning that the upstream standard for CUPS under Linux (using CUPS plus our filter package) will be the PDF-based job processing, letting every non-PDF input be converted to PDF first, page management options being applied by a pdftopdf filter and Ghostscript being called with PDF as input.
Having this workflow we ask all driver developers kindly to not create any PPDs/drivers for non-Postscript printers which require exclusively PostScript. PPD files should at least accept PDF or CUPS Raster now. See also our driver design/packaging page.
More info on our page about the PDF printing workflow.
Making Printing "Just Work" - Volunteers and/or Sponsors needed!
For getting a great user experience with printing there is still a lot of coding needed. Your contribution, either work or funding, is highly appreciated. As we want our work to get a standard, we will let every completed project get into the major Linux distributions, so your work will help a lot of Linux users and will make Linux a better OS.
Enter the amazing world of free software and help fixing bug #1 of Linux.
Currently, we appreciate volunteers/sponsors for these projects:
Vendor WIN32/Mac OS X drivers made available to Linux applications:
Make many more printers working under Linux by creating a wrapper framework for the manufacturer's Windows/Mac OS X drivers, like the ndiswrapper for WLAN cards.
JTAPI implementation: The OpenPrinting workgroup has designed a Job Ticket API (JTAPI) already. You can help us by writing an implementation of this API (libjtapi). We especially also need an implementation of the Printer Working Group: Print Job Ticket (PWG:PJT).
Find more information and contact info on our project implementation page.
We appreciate your participation on these projects.
For Developers
The goal of the OpenPrinting workgroup is to develop and promote a set of standards that will address the complete printing needs of embedded, mobile, desktop, enterprise, and production environments, including management, reliability, security, scalability, printer feature access and network accessibility. This is achieved by
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creating a Common Printing Dialog for all applications and desktops
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providing the tools for publishing printer drivers in distribution-independent packages
OpenPrinting has merged with the former linuxprinting.org and provides now a one-stop location for printing with Posix-style operating systems. OpenPrinting organizes several meetings throughout the year to bring the important people on the area of printing together. Meetings recently held are:
- OpenPrinting Summit 2011 in San Francisco, April 2011
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OpenPrinting Meeting on the LF Summit in Austin (TX), April 2008
OpenPrinting Summit/PWG Meeting Cupertino 2013
Actionable next steps toward the goal of making printing on Linux "just work".
The printing activities of the Linux Foundation revolve around a few focal points:
Support for Fuji Xerox C240 printer PCL
We have recently installed a used Fuji Xerox C240 colour multi function printer in our office which is a Mac only environment. All machines are running mountain lion.
The standard Apple and Fuji drivers are for Postscript only but the printer does not have a postscript kit.
I have also tried downloading Open Source drivers using hpijs and associated pre-requisites rom the OpenPrinting forum but this specific printer is not listed. I have tried a few other printer model drivers from this solution, plus generic PCL but none will print properly or in colour.
Google Summer of Code 2013: OpenPrinting projects
Main GSoC Linux Foundation page: How to apply, deadlines, other workgroups, ...
Contact
Important: We protect the e-mail adresses of our mentors and mailing lists against spam bots. Please replace all occurences of " at " and " dot " by "@" and "." resp.
USING A CANON MX420 connected to a DELL STUDIO LAPTOP.
I recently purchased a Canon MX420 printer & TRIED TO CONNECT IT TO MY DELL STUDIO LAPTOP. No luck. Got a message to say there was an error, hence here I am trying to find out how to connect my printer to my Dell Studio 17 INCH Laptop. Can anyone help? Thanks, Lionel.
Getting a Samsung ML-1210 to work on Mac OS 10.8
I keep forgetting how to do this so I made myself a tutorial. My machine is Mountain Lion (10.8.2) but it should work on Lion too.
OpenPrinting Summit/PWG Meeting Cupertino 2012
Actionable next steps toward the goal of making printing on Linux "just work".
The printing activities of the Linux Foundation revolve around a few focal points:
TDF plans to bring out online and mobile versions of Libre Office.
The recently concluded LibreOffice Confernce in Paris announced interesting enhancements which will take LibreOffice to new heights in days to come. It's just over an year since the initial beta release of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation(TDF) has come a long way with LibreOffice. Now TDF has set their sights much higher. Read onto find out more.
http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/437/tdf-plans-to-bring-out-online-and-mobile-versions-of-libre-office
How to install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot - An Ubuntu Installation Guide
Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has just been released today and Ubuntopia is getting warmed up to welcome the latest version from the Ubuntu stables, With the new release, new users would want to download and test Ubuntu. So we thought it would be a good idea to create a guide to help newcomers do that.
Mozilla Firefox 7 Released | Fake Firefox 7 website steals traffic
Mozilla has just released Firefox 7 following their new strategy of speeding up the release cycles to match with the competition. With this release it hopes to improve memory management issues that plagued its predecessors. Meanwhile a bogus website has sprung up on the web and started appearing on Google search results trying to cash in on the euphoria surrounding the new release.
The Electric Sheep Project | The Collaborative Dreams of Thousands of Computers
What do computers dream about when they sleep? With Electric Sheep, you can view the beautifully rendered collective dreams of thousands of computers. This constantly evolving and changing collection of fractal art is created using the mathematics of the Flame Fractal algorithm and the processing power of an army of client computers worldwide.
Xubuntu 11.10 Beta Reviewed | Improved Panel looks good | Software Center and Thunar needs fixing
On September 2, Canonical released beta versions of Oneiric Ocelot for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
Best Twitter Clients for Linux
Twitter is without doubt one of the most popular micro-blogging/social networking services out there on the web. Even though the use of the Twitter website is very much sufficient to enjoy a good Twitter experience, various 3rd party Twitter clients exist to make things more easy and streamlined.
How to Run udev-discover in Ubuntu | The complete Device Manager Tool for the Linux Kernel
Udev-discover is the complete graphical device manager application for the linux kernel. It runs perfectly well on Ubuntu. It manages all device nodes in /dev directory of your LInux partiion.
How to Setup Conky-A System Monitoring Tool for Ubuntu Part-1
It all started with torsmo,a tool that monitors system variables.Torsmo is no longer maintained,which led to the creation of its fork called conky.Conky checks various system variables and plots graph based on the values.Conky is efficient and fast as it draws directly in the X window system.Conky is easily customisable and flexible.It is customisable as we can extend its functionality using the LUA programming language.Lets start with insta
How to Setup and Use Github in Ubuntu
If you are or want to be open source developer,you must try GitHub. It is a new hosted Git repository service that's being called a "social network" for programmers. It is basically a distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
How to Install Rabbit VCS in Ubuntu | A Graphical VCS Tool equivalent to Tortoise SVN for use in Ubuntu
Are you a developer using Linux? Do you use a Version Control Software like SVN / GIT/ Mercurial ? Do you feel bored of sticking with command line client tool and looking for a Graphical tool like Tortoise SVN for Windows?
How to do C# and .Net Programming in Ubuntu using Mono
C#(pronounced C sharp and not C hash), is a rich object oriented programming language within the .Net framework developed by Microsoft. Does this mean you have to switch to Windows to program in C#? Not at all!!!
BackTrack 5 - A Linux Distribution Engineered for Penetration Testing
Linux, which is a very versatile operating environment, caters for an array of different needs of different users. One such specific usage of Linux is in the area of computer security and penetration testing. Among the digital forensic tools available for Linux, BackTrack is well known as an all-in-one platform that offers security professionals all the tools that they may need to carry out various security related tasks.
