I’ve just added support to system-config-printer for displaying ink and toner levels for printers. It’s in the 1.1.x branch and will appear in 1.1.2.
It works by examining the IPP attributes defined by CUPS for reporting ink levels. Any CUPS filter or backend can set these attributes, but the only real way they can be set currently is by using CUPS 1.4 (in beta) with a network printer that reports supply levels using SNMP.
The “Refresh” button pictured above sends a CUPS-COMMAND file to the queue asking it to report ink levels, and is only clickable for queues that support the CUPS-COMMAND format.
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4 responses to “Reporting ink levels”
Looks great !
There is something however that is bugging me with ink reports. My mum has an HP printer, and she keeps getting a “low level of ink” popup in Fedora 9 and 10.
How could I diagnose this, so that I can report a bug ? Is that even a bug of s-c-p / cups / dbus / whatever that can be fixed or is it the printer that is reporting nonsense ?
It’s being set by HPLIP I expect. It’s about the only driver around that sets printer-state-reasons to “marker-low-warning”, which is what triggers that pop-up.
You can use the ‘hp-levels’ command to find out what ink level HPLIP thinks is there.
Whether it’s a problem with the printer or with HPLIP is hard to say. :-/
When you say it is “hard to say”, do you mean it is “with the informations I provided” or in the absolute ?
I’d love to help fix this issue, but my knowledge of printer drivers is totally inexistent, so I have no clue where to start looking ^^
But I’ll try to see what you suggested, thanks.
It would need further investigation to figure out if HPLIP is misunderstanding what the printer is saying or whether the printer is just fibbing.
You could file a bug using Bugzilla if you think it might be an HPLIP problem.