An Idea for FC4

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 18:49:40 -0500, Jeffrey D. Yuille
<jeffy5 at optonline.net> wrote:
>       Anyway, this is just a suggestion.  Are there any plans to allow for
> the automatic detection and installation of printing in Fedora Core 4 when
> it becomes available?   

I'm not sure exactly what you want to see thats not being done now. 
Having difficulty printing over 'the network'  could be the result of
a number of different problems that would have to be solved before
printing detection can be done.  So maybe its best to analyze why you
are having a problem before we talk about solutions.

You want printers on the network to be detected and configured during
the install.... as in part of anaconda?  Or do you mean post-install 
as part of the functions of firstboot?  Asking anaconda to do this
seems wrong to me.  Having this as in firstboot doesn't seem so wrong.

But the question i guess is this appropriate for firstboot?  I think
there is already support in hal for autodetection and
autoconfiguration of locally attached printers that hal can probe for.
, assuming no bugs.  For completeness sake having a pane of firstboot
review the settings and allow you to customize or skip doesn't seem so
bad, but I'm not sure there is a need. Overloading firstboot with too
many steps to encompass too many tweaks also seems wrong.
If you have an attached usb printer on fc3 that wasn't autodetected
and configured maybe we should talk about why it wasn't instead.

And my memory could be wrong and the memory of those whom  I asked
could be wrong.. but browsing of available cups/ipp printers on the
network is on by default already (assuming your firewall is configured
to allow the communication to work, and you haven't encountered a
latent bug in the cups config)

Or are you specifically looking for auto-detection of Windows Network printers?
Thats a bit tougher... and requires samba to be running and properly
configured. Are we going to shove samba configuration into firstboot
as well as a prereq for printer detection/review/configuration  in
firstboot?

-jef