As I mentioned elsewhere, there are some changes ahead in CUPS 1.6. These changes are not imminent but give an indication of the direction the CUPS project is heading.
Back in 2007 CUPS became an Apple project. Now the parts that are not relevant on Mac OS are being dropped, with some of the Linux-relevant parts being gathered together in a separate project, cups-filters.
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.
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.
Just a quick note that I’ll be presenting by phone today, Thursday 15th April, at the OpenPrinting Summit on the topic of automatic printer driver installation in Fedora 13. The talk is at 1600 UTC / 1700 BST, and was not Wednesday as scheduled. The schedule hasn’t been updated yet, but when it is you can find it and the dial-in information here.