Hi, my last post I showed you our shine new Plasmoid, it got a lot of positive feedback, so thank you all. This post I’ll show you some plasmoid’s updates and the “New Printer” notification popup.

As many of you noticed I had 3 icon printers on the tray, 2 of them where from print-manager, the old icon was shown by a KDED module that keep looking at current jobs, so I removed this task from KDED and added the last missing feature that Printer Applet had, the com.redhat.NewPrinterNotification.

That interface works as follow: you register this interface on the system bus and way for an udev script to call the methods, when you plug a printer you get the GetReady() method called:

Then the udev script tries to find the best driver for your printer and call NewPrinterNotification() method, adding it to your local CUPS:

If it doesn’t find a good driver the status will be different so we show a configure button to allow the user to choose a better driver:

Talking about the plasmoid now, it improved a lot since last blog, it can hide when the list shows no jobs (tho it’s not working pretty well yet), when you have just one printer (most of the home cases), the printer is shown above the list, you can also configure each plasmoid to only show a given printer name and filter the kinds of jobs, so if you are a sysadmin you can put several plasmoids on a plasma activity:

As always: enjoy 😀