Category: Techie stuff

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+…

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 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.

I’ve just added print job failure alert messages to the system-config-printer applet, and this is what one looks like. Part of the work involved in doing this was to switch from repeatedly polling the CUPS server for the entire job list (which can be slow and resource-intensive) to using IPP notifications to find out what’s…