CUPS 1.6 arrives with native Bonjour support

The CUPS developers have released version 1.6.0 of the print server for Unix systems. The update, which arrives one year after the release of the last stable version, adds support for automatic printer sharing and discovery with Bonjour, adds colour management support, and deprecates several printer options.

After being held up by legal concerns for a while, the developers have now integrated support for Bonjour (using Avahi) into CUPS. Several Linux distributions have shipped versions of CUPS with this support patched in, but with the release of CUPS 1.6 these capabilities will be available natively. The developers have also added support for colour management and ICC profiles in the print server on systems with colord and D-Bus.

Other new features in this release include support for password authentication and the ability to set a default username for the server. The printing filters have been removed from the project and are now included in a separate cups-filters project which is being hosted by the Linux Foundation. The developers have also announced that several printer options have been deprecated entirely.

More details of the changes and features in the release are available in the documentation hosted on the project's web site. The source code for CUPS 1.6 is also available for download and is published under the GPLv2, with exceptions for Apple operating systems and the OpenSSL toolkit.

(fab)