Comments on: “New printer” notification mock-ups

By: Tim’s Home Page » Downloading printer drivers on demand

Tim’s Home Page » Downloading printer drivers on demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:09:35 +0000

[...] first steps for using the OpenPrinting.org API which I’ve mentioned before have now been checked into the trunk of system-config-printer. Today’s release, 0.7.79, [...]

By: Rohit’s community

Rohit’s community — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:33:17 +0000

[...] to this post for more information. This tool also has been adopted by the latest version of Ubuntu 7.10. We [...]

By: Tim’s Home Page » New Printer notification bubbles going down well

Tim’s Home Page » New Printer notification bubbles going down well — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:35:11 +0000

[...] like the New Printer notification bubbles from Fedora 8 are going down well in Ubuntu [...]

By: tim

tim — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:34:39 +0000

FWIW, this is now giving real notifications in the development packages. You need:

hal-cups-utils-0.6.10-1.fc8
system-config-printer-0.7.66-1.fc8

It won’t be quite working as designed until I can stop it parsing the foomatic XML, so that’s the next task.

By: Tom Tromey

Tom Tromey — Mon, 28 May 2007 02:30:51 +0000

Tim — this sounds excellent to me.

By: link spew » melodramatica

link spew » melodramatica — Sat, 26 May 2007 02:05:27 +0000

[...] Printer dialog mockups and automatically finding a printer driver via an API over the web « Full Circle, we’ve now got Windows Registry | [...]

By: tim

tim — Fri, 25 May 2007 22:44:12 +0000

Tom: I remember you suggesting both of these things. That’s part of why I want to make this work better.

The “Find Driver” button is the chance to provide the driver. Currently the dialog that “Find Driver” will hook into has two radio buttons:

* Select Printer from database
* Provide PPD File

and the “Provide PPD File” one has a Browse button which brings up the GTK+ file selection dialog.. and from there you can browse the CD-ROM. Is there a way to make that better?

As for downloading the PPD from a web site, happily we aren’t very far off that now. Till Kamppeter has made a web API on openprinting.org:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/Query
This allows us to look up drivers by IEEE 1284 Device ID strings, and our D-Bus NewPrinter call will include those strings for precisely that reason. For the case where there is no reasonable driver to use, system-config-printer would be able to use the OpenPrinting API. It just needs doing.

By: Tom Tromey

Tom Tromey — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:32:40 +0000

Last time I bought a printer, Fedora (5 I think) didn’t know the model. At that point I had 2 wish list items for this area:

First, I got a CD with the printer that had drivers on it. So one nice option would be to ask “did you get a CD?” and then open the drive, let me pop it in, and look for the needed files.

Another idea would be to just download the needed PPD from some web site, say something Fedora related. Ideally this could be updated with some frequency.

I’m not a print expert so I have no idea how plausible these things are.

By: tim

tim — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:32:05 +0000

JonRob: the “searching for driver…” one is overkill, I agree. Getting rid of that just leaves one bubble telling us the name of a queue created for a printer, the first time it is plugged in.

By: JonRob

JonRob — Fri, 25 May 2007 15:11:54 +0000

I like the idea, but also be careful not to end up throwing too many notifications at the user; it’s something I don’t mind occasionally but it’s being used more (i.e. SELinux Alerts in F7). Perhaps it could just notify if there is a problem?