14 DAY TRIAL // Apple announced the release of a new stable version of its open-source CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) software used in the macOS operating system and all GNU/Linux distributions.
After being in development for the past three months, CUPS 2.2 is finally here in its production-ready state, bringing numerous security and performance improvements to make the widely-used printing system more reliable and stable than ever. During its development cycle, CUPS 2.2 received two Beta builds and a Release Candidate (RC) version.
If you're wondering what new features this major version brings, we can tell you that CUPS 2.2 implements support for local IPP Everywhere print queues, along with support for using the http*Connect protocol in Linux-based systems when the CUPS daemon is not running, and an updated database of supported IPP Everywhere media types.
CUPS 2.2 could be integrated into macOS Sierra by default
Other than the above, CUPS 2.2 improves the IPP backend to correctly validate Transport Layer Security (TLS) credentials, updates the printer-state-message attribute to be cleared after an errorless print job, updates various localizations, makes the CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer and CUPS-Add-Modify-Class operations more informative about failures, and adds support for PPD files whose names are longer than 127 bytes.
Of course, there are several other minor improvements and bug fixes included as well in the CUPS 2.2 stable release, which is a recommended update for anyone using version 2.1 or higher. The soon-to-be-released macOS 10.12 Sierra operating system should come with CUPS 2.2 pre-installed, but the Linux world needs to check their distro's software repositories for the updated release and install it. You can also download the CUPS 2.2 sources right now via our website.