Previously I’ve described the D-Bus activation of dialogs in system-config-printer-1.3.  That D-Bus interface has been extended to help improve GNOME.

Fedora 15 has been released for a little while now, including GNOME 3.  One of the great new features in this release of GNOME is the System Settings window.  It is easily accessed from the system menu in the top right corner of the desktop.

This shows a System Settings window containing an overview of all the various tweakable settings for the system, including personal preferences.  They are shown as icons, such as “Keyboard”, “Background”, “Printers” etc, organised into groups: Personal, Hardware, System, and Other.  Clicking on one of them changes the window so it shows the settings relating to that topic.  So if you click on Printers, you get this:

It’s great to have printer configuration in GNOME, and this interface is nice and simple.  There are a couple of things that it needs to learn to do though.

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One of the new features in system-config-printer-1.3 is that various dialogs are can now be invoked using D-Bus.  The details of this are in the file scp-dbus-service.py but here is a summary.

The general idea is that new instances of the New Printer and Printer Properties dialogs, as well as a single instance of the Job Applet, can be requested, and these are given their own object paths.  Each has its own simple interface.

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Fedora 15′s Printing Test Day is next week: Tuesday March 29th.

This test day is for testing all aspects of printing, including setting up the printer, sharing printers on the network, and printing jobs.

If you have access to a printer, please come along and help test things out!

The GNOME 3 printer settings module looks like it will be great. The plan for adding a new printer is deceptively ambitious: the user interface design is that you click “+”, choose a printer device, and then click “Add” and the job is done.

For those unfamiliar with printing, this sounds easy enough. To make the user interface as easy to use as that takes more work than you would think at first glance. It’s the direction I’ve been moving towards in system-config-printer.

Here is a description of the issues involved.

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It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally managed to get native Avahi support implemented in CUPS. This means that CUPS will now advertise its printers using Bonjour. The CUPS dnssd backend can also discover Bonjour print queues. At the moment it isn’t automatically discovered by CUPS, but I hope to get that part done once this work is accepted upstream.

The package with this patch is cups-1.4.5-9.fc15.

Merry Christmas!