Hi all,

one of our plans for 2009.0 was to find a replacement for printerdrake.
The most obvious choice was to use system-config-printer, as it is still
under development and is the default tool in other distributions as well.
Unfortunately it is not easy to replace a tool that is present
in the distro for a long time, because it has a good integration
and a lot of workarounds for many kinds of printers.
I've been working basically in two packages to try to provide a new
printing system,
they are:

1) system-config-printer: provides the interface to add, remove, share
printers. Provides
a system tray applet which notifies the user about printing events and
eventually asks the user to install required packages or missing firmware.

2) hal-cups-utils: in charge of detecting new printers, notify the
applet to let the
user know about what is going on, choose the better printer model, and
so on.

Me and Vanessa have tested some printers and it seems that it is working
as expected,
but as we can't have all the supported printers to test if everything is ok,
it would be great if we could have some help from everybody.

"urpmi system-config-printer" should be enough to disable the old
printer detection system
and enable the new one. (don't forget to restart the session)
Usb printers are detected when you plug them in the system. To add
parallel printers
you must open system-config-printer and do the work manually.

Some strings are not translated, both because they are not translated in
upstream and
because some strings were introduced only in mandriva version. I plan to
put the po files
in the svn soft (just like it is done in printerdrake), so then the
contributors can
help on translation.

For a while, printerdrake and system-config-printer can coexist.
If we decide that the new printing system is ok, we can drop
printerdrake (or provide it in contrib?),
and if we decide it is too early to replace printerdrake by
system-config-printer, we can drop
system-config-printer and go back to the place where we were before.


Thank you.

--
Tiago Salem Herrmann