Category: Techie stuff

I’ve just finished coding up a performance enhancement for system-config-printer. Now after clicking “New Printer”, it starts fetching the list of printer models and available devices while you are still thinking of a name to give to the printer. Previously it would only fetch those lists when you click “Next”.

This question seems to keep cropping up. I’ll explain why printconf-tui is no longer in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and what its replacement is.

You wouldn’t expect it to be difficult for a printer driver to detect that the printer is out of paper. Having spent several days trying to work out the Linux usblp kernel driver, I have all but given up trying to fix it myself. Hopefully someone will show interest in the bug report I filed.…

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…

A weekend hack I’m really pleased with. Frustrated with the “eggcups” print job manager after getting it all confused again, I wondered how difficult it would be to implement a proper print job manager in Python, on top of the “pycups” CUPS bindings I wrote for the admin tool.