• Mexican Jumping Beans

    When I was at school there was a newsagent around the corner that sold real Mexican Jumping Beans, in little tubes containing about five each. Not the little plastic lozenge-shape toys with ball-bearings giving them momentum, but the real things (see Wikipedia article). I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when one of them would…

  • Print job failure alerts

    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…

  • Trouble-shooting screenshots

    Here are some screenshots of the new trouble-shooter in system-config-printer. The actual framework is not specific to printing or CUPS at all, but provides a way of stringing together question screens while collecting diagnostic output along the way.

  • Trouble-shooting

    I’ve added a simple trouble-shooting mode to system-config-printer in version 0.7.80.  It’s not very sophisticated, but I hope it will be useful.  It is a “wizard”-type dialog with forward and back buttons, and the Python source code allows for question screens to be slotted in fairly easily.  If it can’t work out the problem it…

  • Downloading printer drivers on demand

    The first steps for using the OpenPrinting.org API which I’ve mentioned before have now been checked into the trunk of system-config-printer.  Today’s release, 0.7.79, doesn’t enable any of it yet, but the openprinting.py module contains the code.