[lsb-discuss] Printer/driver testing and certification

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmail.com
Fri Aug 18 08:55:28 PDT 2006


One of the outcomes of the Printing Summit in Atlanta in April was that
we should have a common, distribution-independent printer testing and
certification program, so that one can say "This printer works with
Linux/any LSB-compliant OS" instead of "This printer works with Red Hat,
SuSE, ...".

François Déchelle works in the EDOS research project
(http://www.edos-project.org/) on automated testing methods. He suggests
to implement an automated testing for printer drivers, so that it is
assured that all printers reported to be supported by a distribution or
by linuxprinting.org (as soon as LSB-compliant distribution-independent
driver packages are posted there) will really work.

The testing should assure that all drivers are present and in a working
state, so that printers tested and reported as working (or even
certified) really work.

We talked about the testing method and our ideas are as follows:

- Loop through all available printer driver combos
   o On a CUPS 1.2.x distro or a distro with all PPDs pre-built in
     /usr/share/ps/model/ (like SuSE) for example through all PPDs
     listed by "lpinfo -m"
   o On a distro with installed foomatic through all entries listed
     by "foomatic-configure -O" (or by pre-building all PPDs with
     "foomatic-compiledb").
   o In the future I hope there will be a standard method ...
   o On linuxprinting.org by looping through all shown printer/driver
     pairs

- Create a CUPS queue with each PPD found (not all queues must be there
  at the same time, one can make one, test it, delete it, make the
  next). The queue should point into a file and CUPS should be in debug
  mode.

- Print test jobs into the queue and examine the logs (GhostScript
  errors? Command not found? ...) and the output files (Too small ?
  ...). Report any problems in a log.

- Remove the queue and go on with the next driver.

The test should be written in a way that it works on all
(LSB-compliant?) distributions so that the printing support can be
easily checked.

Later on, when distribution-independent driver packages are posted on
linuxprinting.org (so that printer setup tools in distros can load new
drivers automatically from there) the test should also be run over
linuxprinting.org.

This way it should be assured that when a printer is listed as supported
that it simply works.

François Déchelle wants to implement the test scripts.

   Till


P. S.: François Déchelle os also organizing an EDOS meeting here in
Paris: http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/Main/WP3_Workshop_200609




More information about the lsb-discuss mailing list