From the "making it simple" point of view - we are working on integrating the Apple Bonjour[1] stack into Solaris - using this, with suitable Bonjour enabled printers and with Bonjour integrated into the Solaris printer servers stack (it's very simple to add service advertisement to a service) we should be able to "discover" printers. Similarly we will be able to use this via the nsswitch mechanisms to enable use to retrofit discovery into unmodified clients - including printers. While CUPS is capable of using SLP to do some printer discovery, it has limited success [2].
As for the printer features - if we couple this with IPP (be it Sun's implementation or CUPS) we should be able to have a scenario where a printer UI or CLI should be able to find printers and then discover the capabilities of each printer with relative ease. Tie this with a good UI to handle this (either in the GTK+ Printer work Glynn mentioned, or using a PAPI port of the libgnomecups libraries). To handle a new USB printer might be more cumbersome, but the integration of the HAL[3] in to Solaris, as part of the Tamarack work[4] we should be able to receive events when a USB printer is plugged in - this could feed into auto-configuring a printer (or at least providing the user with an option to configure via a "New Printer plugged in" type of wizard). With a decent UI here we could also make the printer addition quite painless (provided of course the user can get the PPD, or we can source it ourselves, Norm you might have some ideas here). If we do this right then this would go a long way to solving the printer problems, at least in an enterprise environment, or even in a SOHO environment where people want to share a printer. Thanks, Darren. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour [2] - CUPS makes use of SLP to discover printers in the locality, mainly advertised on other CUPS servers, but SLP has had some standards problems, with many printer vendors early adopting SLPv1, and each doing so in quite incompatible ways - SLPv2 has addressed many of these issues, but very few printer vendors have made the move to this. In the meantime, with the increasing popularity of Apple's MacOS/X and it's Bonjour stack, the printer vendors have provided an implementation for this on a lot of their embedded printer servers.. This is part of our reason for adopting Bonjour on Solaris, but also the GNOME stack had taken a freedesktop.org implementation of the same (called Avahi) - but importantly they are "on the wire" compatible" - which means there is an increasing possibility of working in a heterogeneous environment (you can even get the Apple Bonjour stack for MS Windows). [3] - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fhal [4] - Tamarack is the replacement for vold, but can provide much more, see : http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/tamarack/ Glynn Foster wrote: > Hey, > > gheet wrote: >> Hi, >> >> We have heard quite poor user experience on OpenSolaris/Solaris >> printing from time to time. Some of these poor use experiences include: >> >> - How can I set up a new print queue for my new printer? >> - How can I attach to a particular print queue? >> - How can I make the default printer to be the one next to my desk? >> - How can I change my default printer on the fly in a mobile office? >> etc... >> >> Actually all of these can be done on OpenSolaris easy enough if you >> know what you are doing. But we want to make it better really :) That >> is, if only you have a vague idea, all the tasks described above can >> be acheived. > > I'd like to get to a stage where for the default user, everything > 'Just Works' [1] as much as humanly possible - although obviously > having a simple to use set of configuration dialogs to do more > complicated tasks. > > I would personally advise us to already start looking at the new GTK+ > printing stack, seeing what that gives us, and develop a printing > roadmap. > > > Glynn > > [1] Seriously, printing should be the easiest task in the world. I can > select a default printer from a list of auto-detected printers. > It'll auto-detect what type of printer that is, and tell me the > appropriate settings I can choose from to print my document. If I > plug in a new USB printer directly, it'll tell me that a new printer > is available. Done. No messing around with localhost:631, no messing > around on the command line. And I certainly don't need to know about > LP, CUPS, PAPI or any other underlying technology I'm using. > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
