14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat's Jiří Eischmann is informing the Fedora Linux community today about the upcoming availability of some long-anticipated printing improvements to the Workstation edition of the operating system.
Fedora Workstation is the main edition of the GNU/Linux distribution, based on the modern and popular GNOME desktop environment, and while work on the upcoming Fedora 26 release is ongoing, it looks like the development team is already preparing some goodies for the next major release after Fedora 26, namely Fedora 27 Workstation, which promises to allow users to easily share printers.
"One thing that I think deserves an improvement is printer sharing. GNOME Control Center doesn’t allow you to easily share a printer with other devices over the network. I’ve heard users complain about it and the competition provides it," said Jiří Eischmann, Software Engineering Associate Manager at Red Hat. "Sharing via IPP is a pretty low hanging fruit because that’s what CUPS already perfectly supports."
Users will be able to share printers with their mobile devices
It's a known fact that one of the main features of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system was called "driverless printing," meaning that the OS supported printing without printer-specific drivers. Support for IPP Everywhere and Apple AirPrint printers was added, and it should also come with the Fedora Linux distribution to allow users to share printers with their mobile devices.
Of course, when we talk about Apple AirPrint printers, we're talking about iOS devices, but for Android users, the developer recommends using the Google Cloud Print service, which is already supported in Fedora Linux, the client side at least. Therefore, Jiří Eischmann is proposing the implementation of a server-side, so you'll be able to also print from your Android device in Fedora Linux.
Meanwhile, work on Fedora 26 continues, and it looks like the upcoming operating system will enter Beta stages of development later this month, on May 30, based on the latest GNOME 3.24 desktop environment on the Fedora 26 Workstation edition, which features a new interface for the printing module in GNOME Control Center, giving users a much cleaner overview of the printers configured on the system.