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
