Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/automatic-printer-conf

• Created: 2005-10-28 by MartinPitt

• Packages affected: cupsys, gnome-cups-manager

Summary

Dapper should offer a semiautomatic configuration of unconfigured USB printers when they are plugged in. Additionally it should improve driver support.

Rationale

In Breezy, nothing happens if a user plugs in a USB printer. In order to make its setup easier, the user should automatically get an offer to configure it, and get guided through the installation. In the future (or the next release if easy), real plug-and-play should be pursued. Just the user plugs the printer and he can use it without any configuration (sane defaults should be used, of course) See [http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=20270 Wish#20270]

Scope

• This specification only covers the cupsys printing system, which we use by default in Ubuntu.

• We only consider local USB printers in this spec. Parallel printers do not support hotplugging, network printers are automatically set up on the clients since Hoary, and the configuration of network printing on the server side has its own spec (PrinterSharing).

• We consider changing to a new Gnome user interface for printer job management: eggcups is generally easier to handle by users and presents print jobs in a more sensible manner.

Design

• Add dbus support to cups to provide a general notification facility to desktop applications like eggcups.
• Automatically start gnome-cups-add when a yet unconfigured printer is detected (either hotplugged, or at session start).

Implementation

cupsys

• Add dbus support. RedHat already did the cupsys/hal/dbus integration. The SRPMS we need to look at are cups (for patches), hal-cups-utils (for unprivileged configuration changes) and desktop-printing (for eggcups notification, which would replace gnome-cups-manager's nicons). We should collaboreate with John (J5) Palmieri and Colin Walters. Easy Software is not particularly interested in integrating this with CUPS (yet), but the patch is relatively unintrusive, so it does not impose a big maintenance overhead.

• Don't require cupsys to be restarted when a new printer is plugged in:
  • Version 1.2 detects the printers whenever a client asks for the printer list, which is much more hotplug friendly and solves the problem.
  • Version 1.2 is due in December 2005. We will immediately upgrade to the current beta versions (merge to Debian experimental) to check what breaks.

Printer drivers

• Search packages providing printer drivers (PPD files) and make them dependencies of the cupsys package.
• These PPD files should be submitted to the cupsys upstream bug tracker to be eventually integrated into new cups versions.

User interface

• Automatically start gnome-cups-add if the logged in user is in the lpadmin and the printer is not configured yet. gnome-volume-manager already has support for it, it is just not activated by default.

• Check that gnome-volume-manager executes the printer policy even when the printer is attached before session start.
• We will try eggcups early in the development cycle, so that we can roll back to gnome-cups-icon if any problems occur.

Outstanding issues

• gnome-cups-add shoud work directly with foomatic printer drivers database (see http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html). Other printer configuration utils, like Foomatic-GUI can use foomatic printer drivers database directly. You steal some code from such projects, look at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/foomatic-gui/ and http://blog.lordsutch.com/?topic=13 . If foomatic support would be added to gnome-cups-manager, then users don't need to generate .ppd files manually or through www.linuxprinting.org web interface and adding new printer will be more user-friendly. Look at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171047 for more info about this bug; if we want to do this, this should become a separate spec possibly; this would make a good bounty

• Since Linux was designed from the ground up as a networking operating system, easy configureation of networked priters should also be a priority. Many (home) users today have setups with multiple computers and at least one printer connected to a network.

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