From Fedora Project Wiki
Fedora Test Days
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Printing

Date 2013-11-05
Time all day

Website QA/Fedora_20_test_days
IRC #fedora-test-day (webirc)
Mailing list test


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Can't make the date?
If you come to this page before or after the test day is completed, your testing is still valuable, and you can use the information on this page to test, file any bugs you find at Bugzilla, and add your results to the results section. If this page is more than a month old when you arrive here, please check the current schedule and see if a similar but more recent Test Day is planned or has already happened.

What to test?

Today's instalment of Fedora Test Day will focus on Printing.

This test day is for testing all aspects of printing, including setting up the printer, sharing printers on the network, and printing jobs.

The changes in Fedora 20 are relatively minor: switching to CUPS 1.7 and Ghostscript 9.10, and some improvements to cups-filters and the "Printers" part of GNOME Settings.

Note that since Fedora 19, printer sharing and discovery uses mDNS/DNS-SD rather than the CUPS Browsing method that's been the default in older releases. The cups-browsed service provides backwards compatibility for CUPS Browsing/BrowsePoll. One of the changes in Fedora 20 is for cups-browsed to use a more efficient method for BrowsePoll (asking for new/removed printers rather than fetching the entire list each time).

Remember that CUPS unit testing is only one small part of the story: printing is very much in need of integration testing. Try printing with different applications, using options you don't normally use in the print dialog. Try to see how many different ways you can break it.

If you see a problem and are not sure which component is to blame, the Debugging Printing page can help you to diagnose it.

Who's available

The following cast of characters will be available testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion ...

Prerequisite for Test Day

All you need is:

How to test?

First, make sure you have applied updates from the updates-testing repository.

  • Configuring a printer not yet known to the system
  • Printing a test page
  • Printing something more complicated, e.g. LibreOffice document, PDF, email
  • Taking advantage of extra print features of your printer e.g. duplexing, stapling

Test Cases

Use the TestDayApp to view test case instructions and submit test results.

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Checking the Device ID is correctly listed
The hpijs, gutenprint-cups, foomatic-db-ppds and foomatic packages all contain tags that associate them with the Device IDs for the printers they support. If you are not given the opportunity to install one of these packages when your printer is supported by them, it may be that they do not list its Device ID correctly. You can check this by running /usr/share/system-config-printer/check-device-ids.py as root.

Test Results

If you have problems with any of the tests, report a bug to Bugzilla. Choose the correct component:

  • gnome-settings-daemon for problems relating to job reporting and printer status feedback in GNOME Shell
  • control-center for problems specific to printer administration in GNOME Shell e.g. the new system settings module
  • cups for printing problems that persist even when using command line utilities such as lp
  • gtk2 for printing problems common to all GTK+ applications using the GTK+ print dialog
  • system-config-printer for bugs in the printing configuration program used in GNOME fallback mode and in other graphical environments
  • selinux-policy if there is some selinux issues

If you see something unexpected, even if you are not entirely sure whether it's a bug, please take the time to report it as one. Without doing that, it may be difficult to follow up and fix.