Mastodon: @till@ubuntu.social
Till is leader of OpenPrinting since it was founded in 2001, introduced the CUPS printing system in Mandrake Linux in 2000 working at MandrakeSoft and with this and a lot of evangelism (booths, talks, workshops) made the other distros also switch to CUPS, since 2006 printing maintainer at Canonical, co-organizing annual meetings with the Printer Working Group (PWG), since 2008 every year mentoring in Google Summer of Code, doing everything to make printing on Linux and alike operating systems "just work". With his OpenPrinting work Till has many years of experience with presenting on conferences and participating in their organization. Till is also fellow of the Linux Foundation.
Accepted Talks:
Opportunity Open Source conference in the IIT Mandi, India: Motivating people to be a part of us!
Organizing every year the participation of the Linux Foundation as mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and mentoring contributors for OpenPrinting I work together with Aveek Basu who joined OpenPrinting when he worked at Lexmark in India. He is reaching out to colleges and universities in India and this way we have every year around 5-7 students as contributors for OpenPrinting, most studying at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mandi.
With the DebConf being in India, Aveek and me have decided to meet most of our current and former contributors in-person and motivate the students, professors, researchers to join the community of developers, designers, doc writers, … in a 2-1/2-day conference, the “Opportunity Open Source”. We will talk with them about their GSoC experience on a panel, have a GSoC Q&A session, and the contributors presenting their work. By a Call for Proposals we hope to get a wide range of more contributions. And for attendees getting some real-life experience we are running this year’s OpenPrinting Roadmap Sprint on the conference and attendees can participate in the discussion and planning of the next 12 months in printing and scanning. We will also live-stream and record everything and allow remote participation.
The conference takes place on September 8-10, right before the DebConf.
This talk is about how we have organized the conference, the challenges, and naturally also the outcome and experiences with running it, having come right from there to the DebConf. And we will have a Q&A session about organizing conferences and also being a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code.
So everyone interested in running a free software conference and/or participating in the Google Summer of Code is welcome to participate in this session.
The New Architecture for Printing and Scanning on Debian
With the background of all modern printers being driverless IPP printers (self-advertising network printers, AirPrint, Mopria, IPP Everywhere …) and the standard job format being PDF and not PostScript any more for years we will have changes in the architecture of the printing stack.
From the 3.x series on (release end-2024) CUPS will not support classic printer drivers consisting of PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files and filter executables any more but go totally IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), supporting only driverless IPP printers. To not drop support for legacy printers the drivers are now provided as Printer Applications, software emulators of IPP printers.
As many driverless IPP printers are multi-function devices with a built-in scanner, we got also standards for driverless scanning, via IPP itself or via eSCL, making the scanners in such printers also just work and especially give us the possibility to have Printer Applications support the full multi-function devices or even create Scanner Applications as new format of distributing scanner drivers.
And this also has impact on the desktop user interfaces, printer setup tools and print dialogs, as we do not have permanent CUPS queues with driver filter and PPD any more but instead, IPP print services for which CUPS auto-creates a temporary queue on demand. So we list IPP services and not queues now and printer setup tools find and install Printer Applications and lead us to the web admin interfaces of the IPP services.
In this talk an introduction to the New Architecture is given and how it affects the Debian distribution, especially also printer setup tools and print dialogs and also the differences between the Debian distribution only containing Debian packages and the Ubuntu distribution (23.10+) using the Snaps of CUPS and the Printer Applications.
This way right after the Bookworm release and in the beginning of the new cycle the Debian developer community will be informed about all printing- and scanning-related changes which have to get taken into account.
And right before this DebConf, on the Opportunity Open Source in the IIT Mandi, on September 8, we will have the OpenPrinting Roadmap Sprint 2023 where we are planning our work for the next 12 months. The outcomes will be covered by this talk, too.