I just submitted a samba patch to add support for proxy authentication to the CUPS ’smb’ backend. This makes printing to Windows shared printers a little bit better: instead of having to set the user name and password as part of the CUPS print queue definition, jobs requiring authentication details can now collect them from the user who submitted the job.
I’ve just released system-config-printer 0.9.90, a stepping-stone on the way towards a 1.0.0 release.
I spent a bit of time today experimenting with making the system-config-printer user interface look a bit more like the gnome-cups-manager interface did, after several people mentioned they preferred it. The aim is to make it look less cluttered, more friendly, and generally cleaner. This is the first time I’ve used an IconView in GTK+ and it’s much easier to use than I had expected. Screenshot below.
I’ve just put together some minimal Python bindings for libsmbclient, following on from what I said earlier. All that’s wrapped is enough for it to be useful for discovering printer shares, so that’s: the SMB context object, the opendir() method and the getdents() method. There’s an example included called test.py, which shows it in action. I’ve included some API documentation as well.
I’ve been investigating the problems with trying to print to a Windows print share from Fedora. The main problems are to do with authentication, both when browsing to find the printer and when submitting a print job. See below for the problems and the steps required to fix them.
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