“Canon will support its laser printer, multifunctional, fax and personal copier products with Windows 7. Detailed information will be available closer to start of sales of Windows 7.”

Well Canon, that was a few weeks ago, time to wake up. HP’s statement if you choose Windows 7 from their official support page is similarly unenlightening:

“HP is committed to providing the best experience for HP products in the Windows 7 operating environment.
Today, a solution for your product is not available in Microsoft’s Windows 7. However, a full solution driver download will be available in late November 2009.”

Apparently the HP P1006 can be coerced to install with a bit of work and the original driver CD. Fortunately I have a multifunction printer that is fine and no real urge to force drivers onto my shiny new install. Neither the Canon or HP site offers an email notification when drivers are available, which is rather inexcusable from two of the biggest companies around.

The reason for these printers not working eludes me. Whilst the HP P1006 is not a “real” printer (instead it relies on software that runs on the PC to send a sequence of dots) the Vista drivers apparently do work, so it should just be a case of testing and signing the drivers for Windows 7. With the most open beta program that Microsoft have ever run, this shouldn’t have been hard.

All this aside, Windows 7 is a really nice upgrade from XP. Microsoft have put in a lot of effort to make it work first time and it’s a real shame that Canon and HP botched this with a serious fail.

As for the Rhythmbox bug mentioned previously, that one does not seem to be fixed in current Karmic.  I tried an upgrade and then a fresh reinstall but Rhythmbox still exhibits the same problem.  Perhaps it is made worse by Squid sending a text/html error page, but that is a standard feature of one of the most popular pieces of proxy software, not something crazy I’ve done with no thought.  For once.

The other bug where Firefox would not save the proxy authentication details for one user is implicitly linked to the “remember passwords for sites” option.  Personally I think they should be separate, but as both use HTTP basic authentication there is probably a very good reason for it.

In the spirit of finding more bugs, Rhythmbox also suffers when proxy authentication is enabled.  The error "glib.GError: Proxy Authentication Required" hides on stderr (visible only if you run from the console) when attempting to play last.fm stations.  Podcasts generate the cryptic “Error in podcast” (presumably because Squid returns a text/html page with the error details).  Fortunately for radio stations the error is much clearer. The cause of all this pain is a bug in gvfs, noted and fixed in Gnome bugzilla as bug 586922.  Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) is currently in testing and includes these fixes, so I will shortly update and see.