My latest little project for Debian is an automatic printer setup tool, built from lots of the bits and pieces I’ve developed for Foomatic-GUI. Details here on debian-devel. Short instructions:

Add this to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://lordsutch.dyndns.org/~cnlawren/printconf/ ./

Then do (as root):

apt-get update; apt-get install printconf

Success or failure reports would be greatly appreciated.

The bad news first: two more Φ letters today. Neither, however, had the audacity to take the opportunity to tell me how great the person they hired is; for that, I am happy.

The good news: it looks like I’ll be spending about a week in France this summer at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, working on printing stuff for free software, like the semi-stalled Foomatic-GUI and the Debian Foomatic packages, thanks to the meeting’s sponsors (as I couldn’t afford the trip myself, that elusive tenure-track job still not having shown up at my door). It’s hard to believe I haven’t been to France in 14 years; I probably should brush up on my French, n’est-ce que pas?

Foomatic 0.6.3 is now available at both Savannah and here; it has also been uploaded to Debian unstable.

The main new feature in this release is the display of information from the LinuxPrinting.org printer database when in the printer make/model browser, using a GtkHTML2 widget. A screenshot of the new functionality is here.

Here's an updated screenshot of the current, more OS X-like main interface:

It’s here. Since the last post here about it, the package has also been accepted into Debian unstable.

I’ve also talked with Tomas Guemes about integrating Foomatic-GUI and his adaptation of Red Hat’s latest printtool to Debian and CUPS. I’m registering the foomatic-gui project at Savannah so we can work on further development together.

I did about three hours of hacking tonight to produce 0.5.1; the newest feature is the ability to set printer options, illustrated below:

Now on to subsume the rest of the functionality of CUPS' web interface and the OS X print manager app.

I’ve finished up Foomatic-GUI 0.3; you can download it here. The main new feature in this release is that the XML parsing is now done using xml.sax instead of sgmllib, so it is much faster.

Also, I have uploaded this release to Debian unstable.

I’ve updated Foomatic-GUI to work with the changed autodetection code in the latest Foomatic printer databases, and made some minor additional fixes. Get it here.

I've also prepared debs of Foomatic 3.0.0rc1; you can download them from people.debian.org.

Here it is. You'll need at least foomatic-bin, python-gnome2 and python-glade2 for it to work (as well as their dependencies). No .deb yet.

Some of the input validation isn't there yet. It does do autodetection of parallel and USB printers; if a printer is known to foomatic's database, it will fill in the add druid for you; all you'll need to do is just hit "Forward" a few times to make the queue.

I've added proper GPLv2 boilerplate to each of the source files and fixed a few minor buglets. Also, you probably need python2.2-gnome2 1.99.13-2 for this to work properly.

Here it is: the world's first look at foomatic-gui. It can do everything except add/modify a printer at the moment (i.e. it does next to nothing, but it sure does look pretty).

I've been spending most of this evening working on a printer config tool for Debian, tentatively called foomatic-gui. As the name suggests, it's designed to use foomatic; basically, it's just a cute frontend to foomatic-configure. I think some autodetection should be possible; however, discover doesn't detect printers, so I may have to do it manually.

I also tried to hack together a new Phoenix+Xft build, but the 20021125 build fails to start due to a missing libc6 symbol; weird.