Printer Driver Auto Download Service at OpenPrinting

Ubuntu Linux (and probably also Fedora and Mandriva, as they also use system-config-printer) has the infrastructure for automatically downloading printer drivers through the Internet from the OpenPrinting we site since Intrepid. For now it only downloads PPD files and packages of PPD files, no packages of binary executables. To automatically download binary executable packages by default, as printer drivers from the printer's manufacturers for their non-Postscript models, it must be assured that these packages which do not come from Ubuntu do not break the user's system and do not introduce any malware.

This means at first that we need to provide proper, secure signing of the packages on the OpenPrinting server and distributions need to include the keys. In addition, the printer manufacturers who upload their drivers to OpenPrinting must take the responsibility over their uploads. This responsibility cannot be taken by OpenPrinting or the Linux Foundation.

This way we assure that the drivers are really from the respective manufacturers and that the Linux Foundation is not liable for any problem caused by the driver packages.

We will discuss here the requirements of Ubuntu to accept the binary driver packages from the printer manufacturers auto-downloaded from the OpenPrinting web site.