Desktop Whatever: Ghee Teo's thoughts on Desktop Whatever

OpenSolaris have 2 print systems, the default print system to date including 2009.06 release is LP. From the Live CD, the LP print system is installed. You may want to have CUPS because of better application integration or other reasons. You need to install additional packages from the repositories, such as http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev.

To avail of the CUPS print system, one needs to do the following steps:

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWcups SUNWcups-libs SUNWcups-manager SUNWpycups SUNWhal-cups-utils

or simply

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWhal-cups-utils

(All the relevant pkgs will be installed based on dependencies)
NOTE: SUNWhal-cups-utils was integrated into build 114, so you need to have that version or later).

Once these packages are installed, do

$ pfexec /usr/sbin/print-service -s cups

(The print system is then switch over to CUPS)

To revert back to LP, simply do

$ pfexec /usr/sbin/print-service -s lp

Some of you may have read from Cyril Plisko's blog that in SXCE 107, desktop-print-management supports CUPS. What does that mean? I guess 99% of OpenSolaris users do not know even that the command, desktop-print-management even exists.

Well, it is technical solution that Norm Jacobs came up to have 2 print systems to co-exist in OpenSolaris in a painless way. In simple terms, when the system admin has set the machine to use LP, all the printing related commands point to that of LP; when it is using CUPS, it points to CUPS version of the commands.

'desktop-print-management' is the command behind the menu entry,

OpenSolaris: System->Administration->Print Manager
SXCE: Java logo->Administration->Print Manager

In build 107 when you have set print system to CUPS, will launch system-config-printer. A GUI Print Manager for CUPS from the fedora community. Tim Waugh has been *incredible* in making this happened. A screen shot of the main window.

From system-config-printer

A couple of gotchas which I must mention here:

After you switch from LP to CUPS (second part of the page) , you should logout and login again. Otherwise, you will get a Add Printer Dialog for LP pop up when a USB printer is inserted. Since that is for LP, even if you add the prit queue, it will not be shown up in the System Config Printer Dialog.

The CUPS equivalence of the LP Add Printer Dialog through the package hal-cups-utils is work in progress.

Ken Okubo has kindly translated the following blogs/paper into Japanese. I hope the Japanese readers will find them useful! Kudo to Ken who works so hard and yet stay pretty low profile.

Ken, I have also updated the blogs to include links to those translated pages as you have suggested.

Japanese version of OpenSolaris Print manager blog

Japanese version of Groups Manager Concepts

Japanese version of Presto Auto Discovery printers - paper submitted for OpenSolaris Developer conference

I must admit it feels nice when I look at the all the katakana/hirakana glyphs, especially when some characters I can recognize like, "容易". That is the Ultimate goal of all user's experience!

Presto is an effort to fill the printing gaps in Solaris/OpenSolaris. The idea of Presto is to automate the process of locating printers as much as possible. So now with the integration of OpenSolaris Print Manager, we can now:

• auto-detect local USB printers and prompt user to create queue on a pre-filled dialog when it is first plugged in.
  
• OpenSolaris Print Manager allows user to do more print queues and print jobs operations as I have previously blogged here.
  

One hidden jewel of Presto which is not available by default after installing OpenSolaris 2008.11 is the auto-discovery of network printers. Due the space constraint of Live CD, one of the package that the auto-discovery of network printer required is omitted from the Live CD, SUNMWsmmgr. To use this feature:

• Launch Package Manager (a.k.a Add More Software) on the desktop
  
• Search for 'SUNWsmmgr', you should see it is not installed
  
• Click on the check box to its left
  
• Click on Install/Update on the tool bar
  

After installation, you have to restart the following SMF services:

• svcadm restart hal (the process /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-network-discovery should be running)
  
• svcadm enable printers:snmp (make sure that this service is started correctly)
  

Launch System->Administration->Print Manager, any network printer in your sub-net that talks snmp should be automatically added to the system and appear in the Print Manager. It will take about a minute for that to be shown.

More on-line documentation about the Print Manager is here

I had submitted two abstracts in April to two conferences over the summer. The good news is both of them have been accepted!
o OpenSolaris Developer Conference, June 25-27, 2008 Prague, Czech Republic.
o GUADEC 2008, July 7-12, 2008, Istanbul, Turkey.

The schedule for both conferences have now been published OSDEVCON 2008 schedule and GUADEC 2008 schedule.

The OSDEVCON is also about Printing Tools, it is primarily concentrated on Presto on OpenSolaris Desktop. While I have been looking forwards going to Prague (never been there before) to talk about Presto and also meet face to face with many of the OpenSolaris developers. Despite all the good reasons to go, I could not make it due to unforeseen family circumstances. So to this end, Michal Pryc has kindly agreed to present the paper on my behalf. Thanks Migi!

The GUADEC session is a BOF on Printing Tools, so in order to make it to work well, I need input/involvement of the communities. So I really look forwards to see everyone who is interested in printing or your applications have printing elements in them to be there! I plan to provide you an update on the GSOC project that I am mentoring on Integrated Printer Management. So Rui, pressure is ON!

Two Flash movies to demonstrate the Printers Group concept in Print Manager

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