Printer status feedback

The print job manager applet is now part of system-config-printer, starting with Fedora 7 test 3. I’ve been working on making it better for after Fedora 7 is released, specifically by getting it to tell me when the printer is out of paper, low on ink, on fire etc. It uses the IPP printer-state-reasons attribute for this.

Now it puts little alert symbols on the status icon, as well as using libnotify to alert the user to the problem. (By the way, libnotify is really easy to use!) Here are the screenshots:

Error notification

Warning notification

Printer status window

I branched system-config-printer at 0.7.63, before these changes were made, so that Fedora 7 just gets bug fixes because it’s past feature freeze.


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6 responses to “Printer status feedback”

  1. […] status feedback. I started some work on this, but it needs finishing off. The hal backend needs to detect paper-out conditions, and so […]

  2. r.ferrer avatar
    r.ferrer

    hi, i am new to linux and fedora…
    i just managed to install my printer, but when the icon showed on the taskbar near the time i clicked “hide” from the pull down menu. It has not been shown ever since.

    How do i get it back? i cant seem to find the setting for this..

  3. tim avatar

    Logging out and then logging in again (and then printing something) will get the icon back. If not, the program that displays the icon (system-config-printer-applet for F-7, eggcups for anything earlier) is not starting up when you log in for some reason. Check the session start-up programs (run ‘gnome-session-properties’).

    Is this with Fedora 7 or something earlier? I wonder if it’s that you have session auto-save on and aren’t logged in at the console. Looks like that could cause the applet not to start up again (oops!).

  4. tim avatar

    …although, system-config-printer-applet doesn’t actually do any session management, so that wouldn’t be it after all.

    So, first question is: what version of Fedora are you using?

  5. Joe "Floid" Kanowitz avatar
    Joe “Floid” Kanowitz

    Launchpad bug #151360 points to this blog entry, but doesn’t link to a solution other than upgrading to 0.7.78 or beyond.

    Where on earth is that state information being stored?

  6. tim avatar

    Joe: what state information? The solution to Ubuntu bug #151360 *is* to upgrade.