Improve printer support in gnome-bluetooth

[Till Kamppeter]

Binary package hint: gnome-bluetooth

I can pair a Bluetooth printer without problems: I click on the Bluetooth icon in the system tray, then I click "Setup new device ...", and in the upcoming dialog I click "Forward" and wait for the printer to appear in the list. Then I click "Forward" again and the printer is paired.

The problem is that I cannot print yet, as I also need a print queue. Especially many users think that they canm print now.

My suggestion is to add the following two features:

1. When a printer is paired, fire up system-config-printer automatically to set it up.

2. If there is a printer paired to the system, let the menu of the bluetooth-applet contain an entry for the printer with a sub menu only containing "Configure printer" and clicking this opens system-config-printer.

If gnome-bluetooth has access to the Bluetooth hardware address and device ID of the printer, call system-config-printer like this:

system-config-printer --setup-printer bluetooth://001A0E1769AA --devid 'MFG:HP;MDL:Officejet H470_BT;CMD:PCL,DW-PCL,DESKJET,DYN;CLS:PRINTER;DES:CB028A;'

(the hardware address and the device ID have to be replaced by the ones of the printer actually discovered). Otherwise system-config-printer can be simply called with

system-config-printer

This makes it much easier for users to complete the setup of their Bluetooth printers.

[Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde)]

Not that I know lot about printer configuration with bluetooth but I have one question. Do you have cups-bluez package installed? Does the presence or absence of that package make any difference?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Onkar, I know that bluez-cups is needed and I have installed it (I have even fixed a bug in bluez-cups). bluez-cups only sees Bluetooth printers if they are paired, and gnome-bluetooth pairs them. So the whole setup workflow is first pairing then setting up a CUPS queue. To make this easier for the user I want to have the possibilities added for gnome-bluetooth calling system-config-printer.

[Baptiste Mille-Mathias (bmillemathias)]

gnome-bluetooth features a plugin infrastructure for few releases, so you might take a look there to implement that (which seems a good idea).

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-bluetooth/tree/lib/plugins

[Baptiste Mille-Mathias (bmillemathias)]

using system-config-printer seems to be widely used on various distributions so it seems to be usable on various environment, but upstream has open a specific bug for the same request with a different to proceed. The upstream bug is http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574065