Todd Fujinaka is testing 5 common consumer printers on 6 recent Linux distributions to see what the user experience is with these setups. He will present his results on the upcoming LF OpenPrinting Summit in Lexington.

The distributions are what you got in September 2006 as stable consumer releases:

• Debian Etch
• Ubuntu 6.06.1
• Fedora Core 5
• SUSE Linux Desktop 10
• Mandriva 2006

He tested also on one enterprise level distribution:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 beta

For the printers models popular on web sales sites were chosen:

• HP DeskJet 5610 (Color inkjet)
• Epson Stylus CX3810 (Color inkjet multi-function)
• Samsung ML-2250 (BW Laser)
• HP LaserJet 1022 (BW Laser)
• Xerox 6120N (BW Laser)

Note that the release of several distributions is already some months ago and you can expect much better results with versions being launched this fall, but this way we show a more realistic situation, especially where one of the main subjects of the Summit is solving the problem that distributions do not ship all all printer drivers or that the drivers get outdated quickly.