Fedora Rules

The Hard Way:

My old HP printer (C5380)  has decided to not work any more, i has served me well and works nicely under Fedora. It is mostly my wife there is using the printer at home, and only for printing documents, webpages etc. and for photo copying.

I picked up a Epson Stylus SX-100 all in one printer in local supermarket for a very good price, with out checking out how i worked in Linux , how hard can it be, pretty hard

I connnected the printer to a Fedora 11 box and it detected the printer and added a printing queue. Started system-config-printer and tried to print a ‘test page’, but notting happed

Did a lot of googling and found out that people only got it to work with some semi open source drivers from avasys.jp

I found some drivers for Fedora 9 and tried to install them, why does anybody makes drivers for Fedora and put them in the a .tgz and not in a rpm, that is a riddle to me .

Now the test page was printing and i could print from F-Spot and OpenOffice, but printing from gedit and firefox was not working, because some problem with selecting A4 as paper size, even when A4 was selected then the print job was in letter, so the printer didn’t like the job.

The Easy Way:

I removed the avasys driver and removed all the print queues and started to try to make it work with the gutenprint driver as the openprinting.org site said it should work with. I checked out the available gutenprint packages in Fedora 11.

it looked like there was a gutenprint-cups package there should contain some drivers from Epson and others, so i decided to install it:

yum install gutenprint-cups

Then i plugged in the printer and it was detected and created a print queue and everything was working

Fedora 11 has won again !!

Article about Yum in Linux Magazine
http://www.linux-magazine.com/issues/2009/103/delicious

Some of it is a little outdated, but still nice

I have made a new prerelease for yumex 1.9.0.
It is a total rewrite of Yum Extender from scratch.

More info here

Download it here
Screenshoots here

I have just made a build of development branch of Yum Extender (1.9.x).

It has been rewritten from scratch for better speed and to make it easier to use.

Read more here.

Here are some screenshoots:

The work on rewritting Yum Extender from scratch, is going very well, the code is now much more organized and it is easier to add new features.

Here are some screenshoots:

The new package view

The new package view with the ‘RPM Groups’ category