Hi all,

If you follow my last post you are probably wondering what KPackageKit has to do with print manager!? Well basically nothing, actually what happened is that while I wait for debconf developers to finish the DBus support, I decided I should work on other things that are not good in KDE 4 to me.

If you don’t use Debian the printer-applet made in python probably works, but here don’t, I never saw it in action, it simply crashes both System Settings and the printer-applet. If the bug is on the deb package or in the application itself I don’t know but when I let it running during the weekend (and doing nothing) it ate 1,5 GB of memory.

This is one of the components that I use a lot and that must work well and be simple, for a simple exercise I looked at cups API and found it was dam simple to create a simple printer queue, If you know me you know I’m no fan of python (Aptcc is an example of me trying to get rid of it), so improve printer-applet would never be an option, also just to monitor the jobs it eats 19mb which also makes your startup slower, in Jonathan’s blog you can see I’m not the only one thinking this way.

Enough said, in 2 weeks of work I have a print queue that can hold, resume and cancel jobs, pause/resume printer, drag and drop a job from one queue to another and filter the kinds of jobs you’d like to see in the queue. While KDE 4.4 is not packaged on Debian (hopefully next week I’ll have it 😀 ) I did not work on the systray stuff since I’m waiting for the new class that KDE 4.4 has, but thankfully Jonathan (from that post) is already working on it, besides the queue I created a kded module that when loaded adds ~2mb to the kded4 process and keep an eye on your jobs, when it see on it will show the printer icon on systray.

Now I’ll finish some small bits (like getting more status from the printer), and I’ll start the System Setting module.

Hope you like it, and if you see Nuno Pinheiro around ask him for a Resume Job icon 😛

When a wicked man dies, his hope perishes; all he expected from his power comes to nothing. Prov. 11:7 (NIV).

UPDATE 02-18: A new mockup: