Oi,
I have been on the Linuxtag 2000 in Stuttgart and have presented my free
software project "X Printing Panel"
(http://www.phy.uni-bayreuth.de/till/xpp/). On the fair I have also
talked with Stefan Siegel about it and he liked it an recomended to post
the suggestion to put it into Mandrake onto the Cooker list.
In reality I suggest to include not only my software. The first one is
CUPS (www.cups.org) which is a free (GPL) new printing daemon which
replaces the old LPD which is technology of the '70s. The advantages of
CUPS are:
- Broadcasting: If you configure a printer on one machine, it is
automatically known on all machines of the network (which machines is
configurable on the server where the printer is configured.
- Printer classes: If one configures the same physical printer on
several machines, it is accessible even when only one of the machines is
running and if one defines a class of a group of printers only one
printer must be working so that the printout will come out.
- Printing options: This is the most interesting point. Under CUPS all
options of sophisticated printers (trays, resolutions, duplex, color and
even things as folders or staplers) are available as they were defined
by the manufacturer of the printer. So no proprietary software is
necessary any more for making use of all features of a printer.
- Easy administration: all administration can be done by a WWW
interface. There is also a KDE administration program called KUPS, see
www.linuxprinting.org.
- Accounting and Authentification: All printed pages get logged and one
can reserve printers only for a special part of all users.
To get additional printer drivers one simply can go to
www.linuxprinting.org
or
http://www.phy.uni-bayreuth.de/till/xpp/
and follow the links.
The part I have done is making an easy-to-use graphical frontend for
CUPS which one uses for printing instead of "lp" or "lpr". It allows
easy choosing of the desired printer and the options for the printout.
All options and the default printer can be saved so that every user can
have his personal options and one does not need to adjust them for every
printout. The
program is downloadable under
http://www.phy.uni-bayreuth.de/till/xpp/
I think, including this software makes printing under mandrake really
much more comfortable and it offers possibilties which had not been
available for free software before,
Till
