• PolicyKit and printing

    The latest release of Fedora allows more flexibility with configuring print queues and managing print jobs. This is because it is now able to use PolicyKit to do these things, which means you get to choose when and whether users should be prompted for authentication when performing administration tasks on printers or jobs. The implementation…

  • D-Bus system services for print queues

    Further to the recent work on replacing hal-cups-utils, I’ve now split out the parts that use CUPS into a D-Bus system service. This allows udev to simply call the D-Bus methods and let the activated service deal with the potentially time-consuming bits. It also makes it a bit easier to get the SELinux security labelling…

  • Re-writing hal-cups-utils to avoid hal

    The program that adds printer queues when a USB printer is connected is hal-cups-utils. It is a simple program that hooks into hal, the hardware abstraction layer, and adds/enables/disables CUPS queues as necessary. As hal will be going away shortly — that, and the fact that hal-cups-utils doesn’t really work very well — I have…

  • Britain’s only large-scale wind turbine manufacturer to close

    Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturing plant in Newport on the Isle of Wight is set to close this week despite a government pledge only hours earlier to build a green economy. There is a Friends of the Earth campaign about it here, urging the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to save the…

  • Profiling Python

    Yesterday I spent a little bit of time improving the speed of adding a new printer using system-config-printer. The main problem was that several bugs had conspired to make it search for all printer drivers three times instead of just once (oops). After fixing that I tried profiling it to see what was taking the…