[gnome-love] Volunteers wanted: New GUI for printerdrake

[Till Kamppeter <till kamppeter gmail com>]

Hi,

during 6 years at Mandriva I have developed printerdrake, the printer 
setup tool of the Mandriva Linux distribution. Printerdrake has a lot of 
interesting features to get all kinds of printers to work easily, 
including special printers which need extra daemons (HP's multi-function 
devices) or firmware uploads (HP LaserJet 1000/1005/1018/1020). As the 
gnome-cups-manager is not maintained upstream any more I have thought 
about upstreamizing (making distro-independent) printerdrake and 
especially proposed printerdrake for Ubuntu (see here also all features 
of printerdrake):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrinterDrake
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/printerdrake

Problem is only that all dialogs currently in printerdrake are based on 
a convenience library from Mandriva (Interactive). Once, the GUI experts 
at Ubuntu did not succeed to port these convenience libraries into 
Ubuntu, and second, the library has a lot of problems with dialog 
layout, as letting text fields getting much bigger than the text, 
missing scrollbars and similar things.

So we decided to replace the dialogs by GTK dialogs, perhaps made with 
Glade. As at Ubuntu we did not find anyone to do this work, I am now 
searching for volunteers to do this work. And do not think it is only 
for Ubuntu, no, it will make a great printer setup tool available for 
all distributions, even for Mandriva.

To try out printerdrake simply download and boot a live CD of the 
current Mandriva (Mandriva One Spring Edition 2007.1, both the KDE and 
GNOME versions come with printerdrake). This environment is also 
recommended to work on the GUI development, as you do not need to 
replace all dialogs at once, but you can work on one dialog after the other.

printerdrake is written in Perl, the files belonging to printerdrake and 
the user documentation you can also get here:

http://www.linux-foundation.org/~till/tmp/printerdrake/

If you like to create a new GUI for printerdrake, please tell. I will 
help on all questions on how printerdrake works.

Let's make a great tool working on all distributions.

   Till