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.
When I was at school there was a newsagent around the corner that sold real Mexican Jumping Beans, in little tubes containing about five each. Not the little plastic lozenge-shape toys with ball-bearings giving them momentum, but the real things (see Wikipedia article). I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when one of them would jump. It seems like they only had them around in the shop for about two weeks, and then they were gone. Years ago I went back to that shop to ask them about it, but the person there didn’t know anything about them.