Sponsored by RICOH

[Cristian Tibirna]

Hello

I am very excited to announce that Ricoh USA, listening to the energetic 
advocating of George Liu, Linux engineer and driver developer at Ricoh, has 
decided to provide the me, on the behalf of the KDE printing development 
team, with a professional RICOH CL4000DN color laser printer:

http://www.ricoh-usa.com/products/product_features.asp?pCategoryId=25&pSubCategoryId=21&pProductId=262&pCatName=Printers&pSubCatName=Color+%2F+Black+%26+White&pProductName=CL4000DN&tsn=Ricoh-USA

George also initiated and advocated the contribution of a very important 
number of PPD drivers to http://linuxprinting.org , covering driver needs for 
printers from Ricoh and affiliated companies.

I cite George: "What we want to do is supporting Linux printing, and KDE Print 
is the most successful printing environment."

Thanks to this support, I will be able to do better tests of new features in 
CUPS-1.2 and extend the degree of support of KDEprint for special features 
encountered in professional printers, for which right now only dedicated 
drivers exist, running on non-Linux systems.
 
It is my duty of honor to underline that the vast majority of the KDEprint 
work was done by Michael Goffioul, the creator of the full suite of KDE print 
technologies. He was generously helped by Kurt Pfeifle, with documentation 
and testing. Michael passed maintainership to me a few months ago, yet he is 
still actively helping with my understanding of the code and with debugging.

My unreserved thanks go to George and Ricoh for their generosity. I thank 
Michael for the tremendeous work he did in the past years.

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org