Wow!!

Release soon and release often wasn’t really the case of print-manager, I started this project 2 years ago, and this is the first official release. I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long which I can’t say I’m not super happy!!!

First off I REALLY want to give a BIG THANK YOU to all who contributed to my fund raising campaign, without it, this project would have to wait even more, because without a real printer testing the “Add New Printer” feature is real hard, even tho I don’t have all printer models available out there with a printer I can at least guess what s-c-p (system-config-printer) did.

It’s been a while since my last blog, but the truth is that there is a lot I’m doing under the hood of the applications I develop, for example PackageKit is passing through some real deep changes which will change a lot how Apper talks with it (for the better). I’ve been fixing stuff on upower, libsolid, colord-kde…

This week I read a rather sad news Dolphin 2.1, and I must admit I’ve been through the same feelings, especially when your friends show their fancy new OS(X), and they show everything just works, it might have it’s limitations, but the overall experience shows something that was not just written, I was well thought. So it made me rethink why I don’t gave up on doing this and just surrender for the fancier that could make all my work much easier? Well remembering last Linus talk (the one he express our hard time with NVIDIA), he said that before he started writing linux he used to write all his tools, and that’s pretty much what keeps me going, the tools I write pretty much to myself, if I was happy with the existing ones I wouldn’t write a new one anyway… Being in a OS where (at least for me) everything just works, removes my fun of writing stuff that doesn’t 😉 (which BTW I’m about to start a new one…)

All I have to say is that Dolphin is really one of the best piece of software I have in my PC and that I’ll keep my hope someday he will return bringing another useful tool for us.

Back to the topic, this new release is a very important step to get print-manager in KDE 4.10, I’ve finally added the most important bits missing compared to s-c-p. Comparing to s-c-p-kde it even has some features that weren’t ported from the original s-c-p. Being pratical it means there are a very small list of TODO’s and we really need your help with testing, thanks to Kai Uwe Broulik the user interface received some real nice updates, and some testing. But we really need more, so if you can test the software so we have zero or near zero bugs before 4.10 it would be awesome. If your distro want to pick this version it’s fine too, but surely there are some bugs…

The cool things this release has (compared to my old posts):

When automatically adding a printer show actions: “Print test page”, “Configure Printer”, “Install Driver” which are shown on the popup that comes when you plug it into the USB port.

KDED module runs on a thread

Dialogs now save their size

KCM doesn’t show the printer list if you only have one printer.

Fixed some authentication bugs

Add Printer Wizard:

Renewed UI

Improved URL handling (specially for samba shares)

PPD chooser calls s-c-p DBus interface to find the best driver

Devices listing calls s-c-p DBus interface to group devices that provide different communication protocols

And lots of other fixes…

If you want to help making this tool the best ever, we miss:

Patch smb kio to see printer shares to be able to browser them and easily add them

Make sure the application works well when we stop/start CUPS

Make sure CUPS DBus notifications don’t break (sometimes it simply stops working)

Create a QML model to expose the print jobs to the QML plasmoid, since Plasma DataEngines don’t perform well on large lists

Integrate with PackageKit (hehe this is fun, I’m a PackageKit guy who did not integrate his own app 😛 ) – easiest one

As you can see the list is really small, so TRY IT!

http://download.kde.org/stable/print-manager/0.1.0/src/print-manager-0.1.0.tar.bz2.mirrorlist