Interview with Till Kamppeter, Linux printing guru and old-time Mandriva employee

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Till Kamppeter joined Mandriva in 2000. Since then he has been focusing on improving the Linux support for printers and scanners. Read Till's interview to get to know him better and to discover the current challenges in the realm of Linux printing, and more!

Hi Till, can you tell us about how you started working on printers and Linux?

Till: During my PhD in Theoretical Physics in Germany I was system administrator and responsible for something like 40 Unix and Linux machines. In the beginning of 2000 I read an article about CUPS from Kurt Pfeifle in a german magazine. CUPS made the full functionality of PostScript printers working without any special effort or special drivers. As we got a new PostScript printer then, I decided to switch our network to CUPS and from then on printing with all our printers worked much better. What was missing was a free graphical interface to select printers and options like trays, resolution, toner saving, … So I wrote one, the X Printing Panel ("xpp") and announced it on Freshmeat. Kurt Pfeifle saw this and invited me to come to the LinuxTag, Europes biggest free software show, to show XPP. There was a Mandrakesoft booth and the Mandrakians talked a lot with me on the Social Event of the LinuxTag. And three days later, in the beginning of July I got an e-mail from Mandrakesoft offering me a job, to switch Mandrake Linux from LPD to CUPS. So I moved to Paris 1st of August and started this job. To get this work done I have made use of linuxprinting.org and contributed a lot of data to its printer database. So I continued at Mandriva as responsible for printing and digital imaging up to now. Due to my contributions I got the manager of linuxprinting.org in the middle of 2001.

What are the current and future challenges in the realm of Linux printing?

Till: One general problem is that many hardware manufacturers only support Windows and Mac OS and so many printers are not working with Linux or are only supported by third-party drivers which do not make it working as well as under Windows. But the printing infrastructure in an operating system is rather complex and there are many more challanges.

I have organized the OSDL Printing Summit in Atlanta in April this year where many important people of the printing sector met. There we have addressed the most important problems and discussed how they could be solved. May I cite the outcomes:

Printer and Driver Installation

We want to achieve correct auto-discovery of printing devices and auto-installation of the matching driver based on manufacturer implementation of IEEE 1284 device identification for direct connect and network printers.

Comprehensive Status Reporting

We want to achieve a set of more meaningful feedback to users and administrators from devices and drivers about printer status, job status, and problems that have been encountered and to facilitate user feedback.

Consistent User Experience

We want to define printing dialogs that are consistent in layout and print options offered to the user across all applications and desktop environments.

Print Dialog Extensibility

We want to design a platform neutral standard & API that allows operating system, application and printer vendors to extend the common printing dialog with their own extensions.

We want to intensively explore the idea of a "printing dialog provided as a desktop service" for use by applications and GUI toolkits to construct print dialogs or to query for printer configuration information.

Driver Development

Open driver interfaces such as IJS, OP Vector Printer and CUPS raster are widely used. We recommend all hardware vendors who have plans to offer their printers for Linux customers to look into available Driver Development Kits which would greatly simplify driver development for Linux.

Print Job Data Format

We want to move to PDF (ISO xxx) as the core format for print job handling (while maintaining backwards compatibility with PostScript).

Certification

We want to enable the printing ecosystem (printer vendors, Linux distributors, integrators, etc.) by providing a means to certify printers and printer drivers against standard Linux capabilities (LSB) rather than against all of the individual distributions.

Testing

Linux distributors, printer manufacturers and the Linux community should work together to make recommendations on a testing methodology for Linux printing. The goal is to establish a globally applicable standard for Linux compatibility testing and certification of printing solutions.

We would like to collect global testing results on linuxprinting.org and make them available to the Linux desktop community.

You're working within the Free Standards Group. What is your role within the FSG? What's the relation of this work with the LSB?

Till: My role will be to manage the Printing part of FSG, the FSG OpenPrinting workgroup. I have moved linuxprinting.org to FSG facilities and I will join this project with FSG OpenPrinting. I have participated in the FSG OpenPrinting workgroup in the last five years and we have worked out several APIs to provide standard interfaces for printing. linuxprinting.org with the most comprehensive printer compatibility database got a de-facto standard for printer driver integration in all major Linux distribution. Now this database will also be used to things like carrying results of distribution independent hardware certification (against LSB-compliant distros) and hosting distribution-independent driver packages.

The relation to LSB is that from LSB 3.2 on there will be requirements on printing. LSB 3.2 will for example require standard interfaces and directories for drivers, LSB 4.0 will also require the FSG OpenPrinting APIs.

See also http://www.freestandards.org/wordpress/?p=224.

Can the community help out?

Till: Yes, there are several possibilities:

• Contribute your experience with printers and Linux to linuxprinting.org. Add printer entries via http://www.linuxprinting.org/edit_printer.cgi?newentry=1. But please supply all important information so that other can set up their printer like you did.
• If you have programming skills and an unsupported printer, write a driver for it. Publish it as free software and it will belisted on linuxprinting.org and get into all distros. You do not need to start from scratch, you can join projects like Gutenprint.
• Contribute to printing-related free software projects (Like CUPS, KDE Print, drivers, ...) by reporting bugs, writing documentation, translating, adding/improving code, ...
• Buy printers where the manufacturer supports Linux, to support their efforts.

How many packages do you maintain for Mandriva Linux? Do you have any other activity than Linux-printing activity within the Mandriva Linux project? Do you plan to keep focusing on Linux printing in the future?

Till: It is probably something like 30 source RPMs (many more binary RPMs, as one source RPM can produce several binary packages). My Mandriva Linux activities are printing, scanning and digital photography. I will continue maintaining these packages at least until Mandriva Linux 2007 and Mandriva Linux Corporate Server 4.0 are finished.

Do you play around with other Linux distributions? Do you have any comments on them compared to Mandriva?

Till: Not really, but I am very often on Linux conferences and shows where I get in contact with other distros. Very good in printing is also SuSE. They are the only ones except Mandriva which have Plug'n'Print (when plugging a USB printer a dialog posp up asking you whether you want to have a queue for the printer, clicking OK sets up the queue automatically). One problem for printing in many other distros is that they try to put too much security into the distros and cripple the software with it.

Is web2.0 a topic you're interested in?

Till: Some web2.0 (in the sense of more user contribution) is already on linuxprinting.org, in the form of the Wiki-like User Notes on every printer page and of the Wiki-like contributing of printers by users http://www.linuxprinting.org/edit_printer.cgi?newentry=1. It is planned to replace all static pages of linuxprinting.org by Wiki pages. The FSG site is already nearly completely made up by MediaWiki and so most pages can be edited by everyone.

I think this is a good thing. Information can be exchanged quickly with less workload for webmasters and knowledge bases like Wikipedia can grow up. Disadvantage is that sites can be easily spammed and with not well-developed client-side scripting systems security holes can open up.

Club Team: Thank you Till. We wish you all the best in your activities, and we hope the FSG OpenPrinting Summit in Lexington will be a great success.

Club Team