Printer Ink levels and capabilities

[Richard Hughes]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 14:52 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 25.08.06 07:46, Richard Hughes (hughsient at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > > If the information could somehow be provided, would it make sense for
> > > HAL to be the place to store it?
> > 
> > Yes I think so too. How can we get the ink information for locally
> > connected printers? Is this a cups thing? I admit I use epsutil which
> > doesn't exactly integrate well with GNOME :-)
> > 
> > What about HP, Lexmark and the others?
> 
> There is this project:
> 
> http://libinklevel.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Looks well maintained and seems to support a wide range of
> printers. Recent -rc versions apparently support HP, Epson and Canon.

Yes, (cc'ing maintainer) I really do think this belongs in attached to a
HAL dbus interface, something like org.freedesktop.Hal.Printer.InkLevel.

This means we get a little interface that any program can query (over
DBUS) and get the ink level for the correct printer).

Or maybe just bolt on a dbus interface to libinklevel and then use it
from a hal addon - now I'm just playing with ideas.

Ink level is something that Linux has really sucked at in the past from
my own experiences.

Markus, what do you think?

Richard.