It’s that time again. Fedora 16′s Printing Test Day is tomorrow, Thursday October 6th. Come along and help make printing work better on Fedora!
The Test Day page has instructions on what you need and how to test.
This is a quick demonstration of how to implement a D-Bus method in Python using asynchronous callbacks.
I recently added support in system-config-printer for determining the best driver to use for a particular printer. This is an expensive operation, largely because of the time it takes to get a list of available drivers from CUPS, and the Python program providing the D-Bus service also provides other services. I wanted the program to be able to deal with other callers while the CUPS operation was in progress. Here’s how that was done.
The Avahi support for CUPS has been ported to 1.5.0 now. I’ve updated the git repository (tracking upstream CUPS, as well as having feature branches for Avahi):
git://fedorapeople.org/home/fedora/twaugh/public_html/cups-avahi.git
Fedora packages for F-16 and rawhide have been built.
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.
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.