22 May 2012, 16:52

printerd aims to be a modern print spooler for Linux

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Red Hat developers Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes have announced what they call a "modern print spooler" for the Linux desktop. The printerd daemon is PolicyKit-enabled and uses D-Bus to communicate with other applications. Waugh points out, that as a design decision, printerd will only accept PDF files as input.

So far, printerd only consists of a basic spooler framework and a simple command line tool. It is modelled on the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) but is not actually compatible with it. Waugh says that the team plans to implement an IPP server on top of D-Bus as a separate tool but that existing CUPS drivers and backends will work with the daemon. The README file of the software also points out that since this is a new project, there is no SELinux policy for the service yet, so users compiling and running the software will have to set SELinux to permissive mode if it is included on their system.

The software is currently still at an very early stage and should not be used on production systems. Users interested in trying it out can find the source code for printerd on Gitorious. The program is licensed under the GPLv2 licence.

(fab)

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