Mandrake 7.2b1 seems to be out; it's got CUPS and foomatic-built interfaces in it. This is a good thing, and Kurt et al went on at some length about this in the Linux Today story's discussion area. If anyone finds bugs in these PPDs, you can poke at the underlying data on linuxprinting.org.
raph mentions:
...miguel said some things to me last night on IRC about inkjet printer drivers which strongly suggest that he values corporate support over high quality and involvement from free software hackers.Ack!!! Some people just don't get it, I guess. Printer companies are among the worst offenders with some practices which free software can simply eliminate:
- Most vendor drivers aren't terribly good. The recent competition on software-driven quality from color inkjets has helped this somewhat, but they're still a bit klunky to use.
- Printer vendors have often tended to discontinue support for older models well before those models are nonfunctional.