HAL and Cups

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 10:42 +0200, Davide Ferrari wrote:
> Hello list
> 
> probably you know the standard cups behaviour of putting the printer
> in a stopped status when a printer is turned off. The bad thing is if
> I turn again the printer on, cups DOES NOT start it again...and from
> cups man pages and website it seems to me that there's no way to do it
> with a config option or whatever.
> So since this is IMO a needed function in a true desktop environment
> (and in fact I'm experiencing problems with it), I was wondering if
> there's something that I could do in the HAL realm, such as executing
> a script to restart the cups printer when HAL detects a printer
> powered on (it's an USB printer, FYI).

The whole Linux GUI interface for printers, for me is shocking.

The backend stuff (foomatic, cups et all) seem to work well, but the
user is let down with the lack of consistent, full-featured graphical
tools. In FC4, printing is a joke.

http://www.levien.com/gnome/print-arch.html

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnome-print/home/faq.html

are useful references

There is still no core GNOME application to get my ink levels in my
epson printer - I have to use the KDE epsutil.

I was thinking of adding this support into HAL. Comments?

system-config-print* doesn't integrate well with anything.

Printing in KDE is much better, with a very unified interface and
suitable tools for managing the print queues and jobs.

Just my little rant.

Richard.