Darren, Do you know if this is part of the GNOME Printing working groups solution or not? I could not see anything related to this here, http://live.gnome.org/GnomePrinting?highlight=%28printing%29
-Ghee Darren Kenny wrote: > From the "making it simple" point of view - we are working on > integrating the Apple Bonjour[1] stack into Solaris - using this, with > suitable Bonjour enabled printers and with Bonjour integrated into the > Solaris printer servers stack (it's very simple to add service > advertisement to a service) we should be able to "discover" printers. > Similarly we will be able to use this via the nsswitch mechanisms to > enable use to retrofit discovery into unmodified clients - including > printers. While CUPS is capable of using SLP to do some printer > discovery, it has limited success [2]. > > As for the printer features - if we couple this with IPP (be it Sun's > implementation or CUPS) we should be able to have a scenario where a > printer UI or CLI should be able to find printers and then discover the > capabilities of each printer with relative ease. Tie this with a good UI > to handle this (either in the GTK+ Printer work Glynn mentioned, or > using a PAPI port of the libgnomecups libraries). > > To handle a new USB printer might be more cumbersome, but the > integration of the HAL[3] in to Solaris, as part of the Tamarack work[4] > we should be able to receive events when a USB printer is plugged in - > this could feed into auto-configuring a printer (or at least providing > the user with an option to configure via a "New Printer plugged in" type > of wizard). With a decent UI here we could also make the printer > addition quite painless (provided of course the user can get the PPD, or > we can source it ourselves, Norm you might have some ideas here). > > If we do this right then this would go a long way to solving the printer > problems, at least in an enterprise environment, or even in a SOHO > environment where people want to share a printer. > > Thanks, > > Darren. > > [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour > [2] - CUPS makes use of SLP to discover printers in the locality, mainly > advertised on other CUPS servers, but SLP has had some standards > problems, with many printer vendors early adopting SLPv1, and each doing > so in quite incompatible ways - SLPv2 has addressed many of these > issues, but very few printer vendors have made the move to this. In the > meantime, with the increasing popularity of Apple's MacOS/X and it's > Bonjour stack, the printer vendors have provided an implementation for > this on a lot of their embedded printer servers.. This is part of our > reason for adopting Bonjour on Solaris, but also the GNOME stack had > taken a freedesktop.org implementation of the same (called Avahi) - but > importantly they are "on the wire" compatible" - which means there is an > increasing possibility of working in a heterogeneous environment (you > can even get the Apple Bonjour stack for MS Windows). > [3] - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fhal > [4] - Tamarack is the replacement for vold, but can provide much more, > see : http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tamarack/ > > Glynn Foster wrote: >> Hey, >> >> gheet wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> We have heard quite poor user experience on OpenSolaris/Solaris >>> printing from time to time. Some of these poor use experiences include: >>> >>> - How can I set up a new print queue for my new printer? >>> - How can I attach to a particular print queue? >>> - How can I make the default printer to be the one next to my desk? >>> - How can I change my default printer on the fly in a mobile office? >>> etc... >>> >>> Actually all of these can be done on OpenSolaris easy enough if you >>> know what you are doing. But we want to make it better really :) That >>> is, if only you have a vague idea, all the tasks described above can >>> be acheived. >> >> I'd like to get to a stage where for the default user, everything >> 'Just Works' [1] as much as humanly possible - although obviously >> having a simple to use set of configuration dialogs to do more >> complicated tasks. >> >> I would personally advise us to already start looking at the new GTK+ >> printing stack, seeing what that gives us, and develop a printing >> roadmap. >> >> >> Glynn >> >> [1] Seriously, printing should be the easiest task in the world. I can >> select a default printer from a list of auto-detected printers. >> It'll auto-detect what type of printer that is, and tell me the >> appropriate settings I can choose from to print my document. If I >> plug in a new USB printer directly, it'll tell me that a new printer >> is available. Done. No messing around with localhost:631, no messing >> around on the command line. And I certainly don't need to know about >> LP, CUPS, PAPI or any other underlying technology I'm using. >> _______________________________________________ >> desktop-discuss mailing list >> desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
