Hello, on my Mac finding a network printer is very easy with Bonjour aka Zeroconf. I was excited to see that Fedora has the Zeroconf avahi-daemon running by default, but unfortunately system-config-printer doesn't use it. Virtually every new network printer has Zeroconf--it's a very cheap feature.
After I installed the avahi-tools package I can easily browse the available printers, --resolve would give additional info like IP address:
# avahi-browse --terminate _printer._tcp + eth0 IPv4 hp color LaserJet 3500 (00306EC4BCFF) UNIX Printer local + eth0 IPv4 hp color LaserJet 4600 (0001E6739D76) UNIX Printer local
Where is the right place to request this feature for system-config-printer and/or possibly implement some code?
I just found http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Printing but it appears quite old (refers to Fedora Core 5 and last edit was about a year ago). It also looks like the upcoming CUPS 1.3 will publish shared printers as Zeroconf _printer._tcp services, which would of course be awesome to take advantage of: http://www.cups.org/roadmap.php
(For anyone not familiar with Zeroconf, as you might expect the O'Reilly book is quite good: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bonjour/toc.html )
Thanks, Joshua
On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 13:34 -0700, Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote:
Where is the right place to request this feature for system-config-printer and/or possibly implement some code?
You can file a bug in Bugzilla and mark it as 'enhancement' for the severity.
I think there might be some work in CUPS 1.3 to do with this, but I haven't yet had a chance to take a closer look.
Tim. */