Since this is been an area that I have wanted to address for several years now, I thought it was as good a place as any to start blogging...
Over the last several years we have been working to improve the printing experience on Solaris.
Since Solaris 2.0, printing has been a on or near the top of the dissatisfiers for users of Solaris. Over the various releases, we have made architectural changes, added features, and made advancements to ease the most common complaint...configuring the service. We have created GUI tools to hide complexity, we have made client support name service aware, we have added open source driver support, ...
While we have made changes to ease the burden of printing management, a while back, we came to the realization that it's still too difficult. Why? Well, the tools are too dificult to locate and often they require specialized knowledge to create a print queue or access one on a remote system.
A few months ago, I proposed project Presto on opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org. Presto is intended to take print service management to the next level. It is intended to address local and network printer device discovery, automatic print queue configuration, network print queue advertising and network print queue discovery.
We are nearing that next stage of evolution. The Solaris Printing team and the Desktop team have been moving forward to achieve the objectives of Presto. With the help of Artem Kachitchkin from the Tamarack team, I integrated the first piece of infrastructure to handle USB printer detection inside of HAL in Solaris Nevada build 53. Since then, several improvements and bug fixes have been made to the print service, HAL, and devfsadmd in order to pave the way for additional Presto support.
We have reached a point where we have a working prototype of part of the functionality. This includes a desktop component using the HAL support to automatically create print queues. It also includes and SMF service that provides print queue discovery support which is compatible with Linux/CUPS and MaxOS X print queue advertisements. While the prototype is a very small subset of what we ultimately hope Presto to cover, it's at a point where the functionality has become somewhat useful.
Improvements to the desktop applet, network printer device discovery and network print queue advertisements are in the works.
At any rate... watch the movie..., download the bits, play with them, join the fun, and let us know what you think at presto-discuss@opensolaris.org. Constructive comments are always welcome, if not encouraged.
-Norm
